The march-cry of orcs echoed far behind her as Deorla slipped deeper into Udûn, moving not along the obvious roads, but through slag-filled ravines and forgotten service tunnels known only to those who had once ruled this land rather than merely survived it.
She did not approach Anglach by the main causeway.
She never did.
The Foundry That Remembered
Anglach rose from the ash like a half-buried titan.
Once, its furnaces had burned so hot that the air shimmered red even beneath clouded skies. War-engines had rolled from its gates — iron beasts meant to crush cities and souls alike. Here, the echo of Grond had first been tested. Here, dwarf-smiths taken during the Last Alliance had been forced to labor until their hands failed and their spirits broke.
Even now, the foundry breathed.
Not alive — but not dead.
The name still fit: Iron-Flame.
Its outer towers were scarred by siege and time, but the core held. Massive chimneys belched weak smoke. Forges glowed low, guarded by Ugrukhôr’s sentries — brutal orcs with pit-brand scars, their armor thicker than anything she had seen elsewhere in Udûn.
Deorla waited until night deepened, then slipped inside through an exhaust shaft cracked open during the war.
The stone recognized her weight.
Days Beneath the Hammer
She claimed an abandoned forge chamber deep within Anglach — a place where the fire still answered to those who knew the old words. The light there was dim, fed by half-starved furnaces and veins of molten iron that pulsed beneath the floor like veins in a dying beast.
For three days, she did not leave.
She stripped her armor piece by piece.
The black plates bore scars from Rohan, Gondor, Ithilien — dents where blades had struck, cracks where she had nearly fallen. She reforged them with care, heating the metal slowly, folding it back into itself, whispering old Black Speech not as spells, but as discipline.
Her blades followed.
One was reforged for speed.
The other for cruelty.
Each night, she listened.
Anglach spoke through vibration — the rhythm of hammers elsewhere in the foundry, the groan of chains hauling iron, the screams of things being tested and discarded.
And what she learned pleased her.
Ugrukhôr had claimed Anglach well.
From its depths, war machines crawled back into existence — crude, brutal constructs meant to guard his citadel in Udûn’s deepest basin. Spiked rams. Chain-flails mounted on rolling frames. Iron-plated beasts dragged by enslaved trolls.
He was not rebuilding Mordor.
He was fortifying himself against it.
He fears rivals more than enemies, she realized.
That fear made him predictable.
Whispers in the Iron Dark
Deorla did not reveal herself.
She moved above them instead — along broken gantries and half-collapsed walkways, where shadow clung thick as oil and even orc-eyes failed to pierce the dark. Below, near one of Anglach’s lesser furnaces, a pair of orcs argued in low snarls while feeding slag into the fire.
She listened.
They spoke of raids interrupted.
Of supplies vanishing before reaching Ugrukhôr’s stores.
Of humans — Easterlings — moving through the ash-wastes with discipline rather than fear.
And then a name surfaced.
Sereg.
The sound of it tightened something in her chest.
One of the three commanders she herself had appointed in the final years of the Unseen War. A man of Rhûn — patient, disciplined, dangerously ambitious. She had trusted him with men, with supply routes, with independent command. When Sauron fell, she had assumed him dead or scattered like the rest.
But the orcs spat his name with unease.
“Sereg still breathes,” one growled.
“He does not bow to the Pit-Captain.”
“He camps near the border of Udûn — gathers men — waits.”
The other hissed back, glancing nervously into the darkness.
“They say he still serves the Dark One.”
“They say he serves no one.”
“They say he wants Udûn for himself.”
Deorla smiled in the shadows.
Alive.
Unbroken.
Unbowed.
Whether Sereg clung to the memory of Sauron, or merely sought to carve a kingdom from the carcass of Mordor, did not yet matter. What mattered was that he had not submitted to Ugrukhôr — and that made him either a rival… or a blade waiting to be taken up.
She slipped away from the forge without a sound.
Her armor newly reforged.
Her blades hungry.
Her path decided.
“If you still remember who placed the crown upon your brow,” she thought, “you will kneel.”
“And if you do not…”
She turned toward the ash plains leading to the border of Udûn, where fires flickered faintly — a camp hidden just beyond the Pit-Captain’s grasp.
Deorla would go to Sereg.
Not as a ghost.
Not as a memory.
But as the Herald returned to claim what remained.
