squirrelwrangler:

Next chapter, where the link to Beren’s Band of the Red Hand become very apparent. ~flashbacks~

The later half of the First Age from the perspective of two elves trapped in Angband, loosely inspired by A Dance of Dragons.  The childhood companion of Finduilas Faelivrin must take the princess’s identity to survive in the enemy’s hands. Another prisoner, regretting he did not join Beren’s quest, tries his best to save her.

AO3 – Chapter 1

“Where was I? I should have died with him.”

He should have died with Aglar in the dungeons.

Faron had trained himself not to think of his regrets as he curled in the cells of Angband, useless an endeavour as it could hope to be. Angband was coal and iron and regrets. Thoughts that were not centered on present pain and misery only spiraled back to regretting the path that led to it. In Angband sleep came without rest or relief. It rarely came anyway. His bed was stone and his companions wargs, so what little sleep the elven thrall could snatch was huddled against the flanks of the oldest beast, the jaws of the warg resting atop his ankles as its red eyes watched him under heavy lids. The wargs barely tolerated him in their pen; if he thrashed in his sleep or cried too loud the beasts would savage him. Their sleep was no more placid than his.

The memories came when Faron slept, flooding his thoughts with more variety than the day-to-day banality of physical pain and fear allotted to thralls of Angband. Futilely his mind chased after the void as poisons of anxiety, pain, and self-recrimination accumulated in the marrow of his bones. An arrogant boy he had been, desperate to avenge his friends and prove his prowess to anyone that knew his name, desperate for glory to make his name widely known so that his accomplishments would earn something besides scorn from his father, to overshadow his martyred brothers and balance the guilt of betraying those friends he had loved more than any brother. That arrogant boy had laughed when he rode into battle. Faron tried to recall his old laughter, and could only hear the examples of orcs. He almost wanted to hate that boy, that fool that believed in victory and glory. Faron had been a boy that thought himself a man, who thought his duty was to avenge the companions he had not died beside. Eager for death he had been, in the manner of young warriors who thought death was something they bequeathed and never received, whose thoughts lingered on loved ones that had gone to the Halls of Mandos and not of what their own passage would cost.  He feared not a life underground because he knew only the caves of Nargothrond, coddled by the freedom to seek the sun if the echoes began to overpower him. As a thrall of Angband, he has not seen the sun since the disastrous battle. No day ever came again. Eager to ride north and challenge the darkness he had been, that boy named Faron wanted nothing as strongly as to see Angband and win glory before its iron gates. He had known nothing of true darkness. Angband was the cruel fossilization of soul, entombing a body in the miserable all-encompassing darkness of its iron mines, slowly eating away flesh and bone, and filling the cavity with a broken slinking creature that cowered in desperation.

He should have died beside Aglar, together as prisoners in a different dungeon.

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