Looking up at the sky, the young elf hummed a quiet melody that came to his mind. It might have been an old melody he had picked up from someone else, perhaps in Lothlorien, where they were coming from, or it might have been a new melody that the light of the stars brought forth in this very moment. It had been a quiet journey. They had crossed the Redhorn Pass fortunately before the first severe snowfall up in the mountains, as his mother had hoped. Usually, they waited for an opportunity to travel with a larger group, but his mother had been eager to make it to Imladris before the winter and did not wish to wait. There had not been any incidents on the pass in the previous few years and his parents had decided that the route was safe enough, as long as they stayed away from any caves and moved across the highest part of the pass in bright daylight. He had trusted them, as he had done all of his life during their travels.
While they had sung together on the path down, leading their horses, they had fallen quiet after mounting again. His mother seemed unusually restless since then, he thought, as his gaze turned away from the stars and rested on his mother for a moment, who rode before them as always. Looking to his side, he thought he could see a tense watchfulness in his father’s face, but then his father turned his head and sent him an encouraging smile that made his eyes laugh in a way such that no one could help but smile with him, and the young elf felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth immediately in response, his slight unease forgotten. Maybe his parents’ unease was because of the sad history of the land they were riding through he thought, as he glanced at the dark holly trees around them. He opened his mouth to ask his father for another story about those times, when their horses suddenly neighed in fear and at the same time he felt a painful blow hit his side. He did not know it, but his father had saved his life with a desperate move at the first sign of danger.
He did not remember much after that. His head hurt. His horse…? He must have fallen off, but…how? Attempting to move his arms, he winced and bit his lip. His body hurt and he seemed to be lying on his side, the harp, which he could still feel slung on his back, must be preventing him from rolling over.
What was this noise? It sounded like… He could not see anything at first after opening his eyes. Blinking, he looked around, finding his view partially blocked by dense foliage. The edge of his sketchbook was painfully digging into his side and he felt a burning pain all over his skin. The darkness around him, lit only by a strange orange light he could not explain, did not help to make out anything but blurry movement at first.
Then he heard something that would haunt him through many sleepless nights from there on: The terrible scream of a woman. The scream of his mother. He heard a thud of something hard yet soft falling onto the ground, then he found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of his father. The same eyes that had sparkled with joy only moments before. Frozen in fear, unable to move, unable to look away, the young elf lay in his hiding place as the world seemed to end around him. Rough unfriendly voices laughing and shouting in an unfamiliar tongue, stomping of quick, booted feet on the ground, the clash of metal on metal, the smell of blood and something foul, the terrified sounds of horses, another scream farther away that ended abruptly – it all merged into a conglomerate of terror repeating endlessly around him until he could hear nothing else and his eyes stared, unseeing, all music in him dead.
The first sound he made was a scream of such pain that the hand on his shoulder was drawn back quickly. Kicking and lashing about, he hurt himself further on the sharp branches around him, until more hands grabbed him firmly, halting his movement effectively while he was lifted up.
The first thing he heard through the repetitions playing in his head, were soft voices that had not been there before and it made him stop kicking. “Adar?” he asked with a hoarse voice. The first thing he saw, after the darkness began to lift, were the concerned eyes of an elf he had never seen before in his life. Had he been capable of forming such thoughts, he might have recognised that the stranger was wearing the uniform of the Imladris guard.
