The exact spot along the road beside the Bay was not hard to find.
The cobblestones of the roadway were still scorched where the carriage had burned, the repairs of the low brick wall were quite easy to spot. The aura and scent of blood still lingered, the shadows of pain and death still hung about the spot like fading bunting after the parade had long past.
Xanderian struggled to keep her mind free from reliving those moments, to focus on the task at hand. Thankfully, most of those events were still lost in a blood red fog. She recalled the shrieks of horses, the scent of burning hardwood, the prickle along the back of her neck of dark magic. She remembered loosing arrows at those she loved…and the exploding darkness as her sister struck her down.
And she remembered Gwaelion’s scream...Hawke's scream... cut short…and the silence that followed. She had dreamt of that silence again and again.
Once she had the location, she carefully picked her way down the cliffside, at times struggling for handholds, but she had climbed higher, sheerer walls in the past..and no one was trying to kill her as she climbed down this one. Finally she set her feet on the rocky shore, the tide crashing just a few inches from her boots.
Some of the taller spikes of jagged stone still bore the dark stains of blood as she focused her mind, feeling the flow of water and air and mist and time around her…her breathing falling in rhythm with the waves as she cast herself back and forward at once, and began tracking the course the remains of her love had to have taken once they were swept off the stones by the sea.
Carefully despite the fact her eyes were closed, she slowly walked along the narrow shoreline for an hour, perhaps more, until she stopped. Here on a sandy shoulder of land, sheltered by a few solid slabs of wet granite, the scent of blood grew intense. Dropping to one knee, she could easily see the damp sand was still mixed with gore. Noting a depression in the sand, a streak of black blood on grey stone, a few scraps of torn seaweed drying on the beach, Xanderian Longtracker knew…Hawke had washed up here.
Yet here he did not end as carrion. Yes, from the prints in the sand, feathers trapped in the underbrush, there were once many gulls here, but they were gone and there was no sign of nests to have drawn them. Beyond, they had not come to feed as there were no bits of bone and meat left behind as would have been if they had served their function, clearing away the refuse of the sea.
His body and bones were gone, none the less.
Xanderian closed her eyes, sifting backwards, one with this place and the time that had flowed over it…feeling the crash of waves, the shallow breathing of a dying man, helpless moans of insensible pain…and finally, a voice. Soft, half swallowed as if they spoke to themselves, yet a voice, filled with concern.
Gentle words spoken in Quenya clung to the cliff wall, where no Quenya should have been spoken. Someone had been here, an elf...a Noldo. Looking at the delicate traces of the footprints they had left in the sand, they were male from the width...and they were clearly heavier when departing then when they arrived. The Noldo had bourne Hawke’s body from here, and from the angle of the footprints they did so while carrying him gently in their arms, not over their shoulder like a corpse. They left with Hawke while he still lived…but to where.
They did not climb the cliffside to the road, they had come and then departed along the narrow coastline on foot…so they did not travel far, or at least not far for a Noldor scout.
There was only one place this mysterious elven benefactor could have taken Gwaelion, therefore.
Hawke must have been taken to the Haven of the Avorrim, where implacable Dorthaneth and her Yacina, the warriors who call themselves Sacrificed, wait to reclaim the houses of their fathers in shattered Edhellond, whatever the cost.
While the Yacina bear no malice to men as long as they are not provoked, they offered them no great love either. What reception would a wounded man of Bree and Gondor find in their hidden caves?
Xanderian sighed to herself as she began to climb back to her waiting horses. “Hope is restored...but how faint a hope it is. As sweet Eduwiges would say…was the platter departed just to writhe in the campfire.”
Grateful that at least Gwaelion had survived the fall, Xanderian began the ride to face her cousins in the Caves of the Avorrim and the potential wrath of Dorthaneth. The twice they had met in the past had not ended well, and the Captain of the Yacina had sworn at another time that if she would ever lay eyes upon Xan’s sister Xandilif again, one of them would die.
Laying against the neck of her horse, Xanderian raised her voice, calling out to the wind. “Fear not Gwaelion of Ost Lontir, whether by honeyed words or Heartbreaker’s wrath, I will bring you home, living or dead....
...or die trying."
