The Music in My Heart
folder
Lord of the Rings Movies › Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
75
Views:
3,766
Reviews:
11
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Lord of the Rings Movies › Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
75
Views:
3,766
Reviews:
11
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own the Lord of the Rings book series and movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Chapter 15 The Doors of Perception
Title: The Music in My Heart, Chapter 15
Author: Sorsha
Fandom/Pairing: Elrond/OFC, Glorfindel/Haldir, Elladan/OFC, Elrohir/Legolas, others implied
Rating:.NC-17 for future chapters
Warning: AU (Story set 770 years after ROTK); Slash and het.
Feedback: This is my first fanfic, so constructive feedback appreciated.
Archive:
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Alex Cat for her help in betaing this fic.
Disclaimer: Any of the residents of Middle-earth and Aman that you recognize belong to Prof. Tolkien’s estate. The same is true about Middle-earth and Aman. I’m only visiting and admiring the “views”.
Summary: Sauron may be gone, but his legacy of evil still lingers. As Middle-earth faces the threat of another dark lord, a party of elves departs Aman on a mission for the Valar, a mission of mercy long delayed.
Chapter 15 --- The Doors of Perception
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
William Blake*
*****
The following weeks fell into a pattern. Elrond, the twins, and their extended family of friends and advisors met for breakfast each morning to review the latest intelligence, hear a daily briefing from Ermehtar on security issues, and receive updates on the plans for the upcoming Convocation and Council meetings. Any dreams or visions either Seere or Elrond had were discussed. Urgent matters were debated and responses developed.
After breakfast, Elrond and Seere worked in the library or his study for much of the rest of the day. While Lindir assisted the seers with research, the two spent much of their time piecing together the heretofore disconnected threads of the history for the last several hundred years. Formal records had proved to be a rich source of information when viewed from this new perspective and, more often than not, they provided details that confirmed the accuracy of their visions. An intriguing pattern began to emerge as seemingly isolated incidents slipped into place, fitting like the pieces of a puzzle.
The history, coupled with the insight of the visions, showed that the attacks fell into three basic categories --- those designed to disrupt the security/communications of an area, those designed to distract attention from another location while another incident was taking place elsewhere, and those designed to locate and/or retrieve a specific item or individual.
Only recently did the attacks appear to be designed to destroy villages, drive families from their homes, and kill as many as possible. Gimli had made the ominous observation that this recent pattern was starting to take on the appearance of a sheep dog herding the flock into their pens to make the job of shearing and culling easier for the herders. The walled cities did indeed seem much like pens for those sheltered within their walls.
*****
They had been surprised to learn the number of people that had been captured in raids over the last three hundred years. Except for Imladris and Lorien’s archives, records from the other realms for further back were proving harder to obtain, so an exact count had not been made. Thus far, they had identified thirty-eight people that had been captured never to be seen again; twenty-one were elves, three hobbits, and the others human.
Most were local historians and lore masters with extensive knowledge in either the local history of an area or of Morgoth and Sauron. The rest were those gifted with strong magical or prophetic abilities. Celeborn and Erestor remembered hearing reports of some of these people being “lost” in attacks, but had not known they had been captured; the assumption had been made that they had been killed. Two had been elves that had served as advisors to Gil-Galad and were well known to the veterans of the Last Alliance. The news of their capture had been upsetting.
An accurate accounting of items seized in various raids had proven the most difficult to obtain. In most cases, those conducting the investigation had found no record or inventory that would indicate what information or artifact had been stored at a particular location. From the ransacked appearance of these sites, it seemed records had also been taken or destroyed. In all but a small handful of cases, those that had this knowledge had either died in the attack or been taken by the raiders.
Most troubling of all was that many of these individuals had been acknowledged experts on the history of Morgoth and Sauron or were the caretaker of some purportedly innocuous object or document related to one of the dark lords. Any object or document that had been deemed a danger had been destroyed in the years just after the Ring War. The value of what was left had been dismissed and the records detailing these items had gone missing in the years after Sauron’s defeat, thought exactly when was not known.
References to Morgoth and Sauron had become a reoccurring theme found in some fashion in all of the background reports of the missing. Some had been researching historical records about one or both, others had been studying their legacy of dark practices, and still others had helped defeat one or both. Mordor began to find its way out of the documents and into the discussions circulating around the ‘history puzzle’, as Elladan dubbed it.
Since the Ring War, Mordor had been uninhabited except for Nurn, the southern portion that had been given to the Sauron’s freed slaves. The heart of Sauron’s realm surrounding Orodruin and Barad-Dûr was still seen as evil by the free peoples and none wished to settle in the former stronghold of Sauron. Rohan and Gondor had assumed joint responsibility for its oversight and policing. While travel through those tainted lands was not expressly prohibited, the combined security force stopped any person or group found within it borders for questioning. Permanent settlements were not known to exist --- sanctioned or otherwise.
The records of the combined security force had noted periodic encounters with “nomadic bands of men of indeterminate origin” in or near the lands of Mordor beginning less than fifty years after the fall of Sauron. These sightings were reported in roughly the same locations decade after decade and had been occurring with growing frequency in the last three centuries. These ‘temporary camps’ had been investigated with varying degrees of vigor and corresponded to similar reports of ‘wandering camps’ or ‘landless vagabonds’ from other parts of Middle-earth.
These reports coincided with references to violent, but infrequent skirmishes with orcs and uruk hai on roads leading in and out of Orodruin and Barad-Dûr. They had been dismissed as nothing more than the last tattered remnants of Sauron’s army that had survived the war and the earthquakes that devastated Mordor after the one ring was unmade. Left without a master, they were seen as a nuisance to be ‘cleaned up’ rather than a threat to the long-term peace of Middle-earth.
Despite their contention that these bands were simply a few scattered survivors, the security force was still reporting these skirmishes, with increasing frequency, over 750 years after Sauron was defeated. More recent reports indicated that these bands now had contingents of humans fighting along side the fell beasts of Middle-earth. Further investigation of these reports had been infrequent, if they occurred at all. As the time between incidents was often thirty or more years in the beginning, they did not appear to be part of a larger, organized force. When they had actually became one was unclear as the records still ignored this probability.
The maps drawn from Seere’s dreams took on new significance as information about known attacks or reports of unexplained activities were noted on a map. Haldir had been the first to see the correlation between the information emerging on the history puzzle map and the locations marked on the second map Seere had seen in her vision. The second marked locations of abductions or the theft of some artifact. Until then, the significance of that map had not been clear. Only eleven sites shown on Seere’s map were not also marked on the mystery puzzle map. The significance of those sites was under investigation.
Individual reports or isolated attacks scattered over a span of hundreds of years appear singular when viewed from the perspective of the mortal; for immortals, a hundred years is but a moment in time and the repeating themes took on new significance, evidenced an organized pattern. Pouring over the maps and documents of the ‘history puzzle’, two facts were becoming clear --- sanctioned or not, Mordor appeared to be inhabited once again and the legacy of the Morgoth and Sauron appeared to be the unifying element.
*****
Erestor stood on the balcony outside the main library lost in his private thoughts. For almost 750 years, he had searched for clues of what might have happened to Laurea, his beloved wife. She had taken Seere for a visit to Gondor to introduce their young daughter to her old friend Arwen. Erestor had planned to accompany her on the journey, but a last minute breakdown in the negotiations for a trade alliance with Rohan had demanded his attention. This decision had lead to one of the few arguments of their married life and Laurea had left for Gondor without him.
Erestor had quickly resolved the dispute with the party from Rohan and had left for Gondor less than a week after her departure. He had ridden his small guard hard wanting to catch up to his wife’s party as soon as possible. To his dismay, he found his baby, his beloved Seere, in the protection of two-thirds of his wife’s travel guard with no sign of where his wife had gone.
Her cousin, Russe, had let the small security detail that had accompanied Laurea on what she had called ‘an urgent mission’ following the receipt of a message of unknown content from an unspecified sender. Her party had never been seen again. Their trail had quickly gone cold leaving few clues of their fate.
Torn between fear for the safety of his small child and the need to follow Laurea as soon as possible, Erestor had chosen to take Seere to Arwen before turning his focus to following his wife’s trail. He had always wondered if he made the right choice, if following her immediately would have produced a different result… if the few days it took to take Seere to safety allowed the trail to be lost to the elements.
He knew in his heart and in his mind that he had made the right choice. His baby daughter was helpless and they were exposed in the wilds of Gondor with only seven guards to defend her. Not knowing what had happened to Laurea and her guard had only heightened that worry.
No, he did not regret protecting his pen vuil; that was a father’s sacred duty and one he honored with great joy. No, that was not it. Guilt, however, did not require logic or reason to tear at a lover’s fëa when the one he loved was lost. The endless pain of his internal monologue had one refrain, “What if…?”.
He sat and listened as the others discussed those that had been taken. The stories of several of those lost sounded all too familiar. A sudden message not shared with anyone, a hurried departure with few if any guards, and then silence, a cold trail with no resolution to the question “Where did they go?”
/Has anyone else recognized the similarity to what happened with Laurea and her guard? We believe her twin brother to be the red-headed half-elf controlling these events, the pretender to the crown of dark lord. If Lhach is the one controlling the Hordes, it is not without a reasonable basis to suspect he might be behind Laurea’s disappearance as well. Is she the thirty-ninth captive identified thus far by the history puzzle?/
Sighing, Erestor’s grip on the railing tightened. /Lhach has always been jealous of Laurea’s gifts and she would fit the pattern of one with special magical and prophetic abilities; she and her twin are half Maia after all. He is one of the few that could have lured her away, convinced her to leave our child to the care of guards in the wilds of Gondor./
Looking out over the gardens of Imladris without seeing any of it, he tried to avoid asking himself the one question that plagued his fëa --- could her brother have killed her, his twin? The pain of his guilt, of his grief rose to grip his heart and he wondered yet again how he could continue.
A gentle hand came to rest on his right shoulder. Startled, he looked up to see the kind regard of his friend, the one that had been his greatest support in those grim days and beyond --- Celeborn. To his left, he felt a hand settle on his own where he gripped the railing. Warm silver gray eyes offered silent support. Two slender arms slipped around his waist and the familiar comfort of his daughter came to rest against his back. Without looking, he knew that the twins and Glorfindel hovered nearby.
Taking a deep, shaky breath he found the answer to one of his questions. /I will continue because I am not alone./
*****
A/N: Russe --- Sword-blade
A/N: * --- Cool piece of trivia – Aldous Huxley used this Blake quote in naming his book, “The Doors of Perception” (about his experiences during a peyote trip of all things). Jim Morrison so liked the book, he and his band-mates named their band the ‘Doors’. In their honor, I hummed a little ‘Riders on the Storm’ and ‘LA Woman’ while I wrote this chapter.
Hi. If anyone is reading this, I'd really appreciate some reviews. This is my first fic and I'd love to know what people think of it. Thanks!
Author: Sorsha
Fandom/Pairing: Elrond/OFC, Glorfindel/Haldir, Elladan/OFC, Elrohir/Legolas, others implied
Rating:.NC-17 for future chapters
Warning: AU (Story set 770 years after ROTK); Slash and het.
Feedback: This is my first fanfic, so constructive feedback appreciated.
Archive:
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Alex Cat for her help in betaing this fic.
Disclaimer: Any of the residents of Middle-earth and Aman that you recognize belong to Prof. Tolkien’s estate. The same is true about Middle-earth and Aman. I’m only visiting and admiring the “views”.
Summary: Sauron may be gone, but his legacy of evil still lingers. As Middle-earth faces the threat of another dark lord, a party of elves departs Aman on a mission for the Valar, a mission of mercy long delayed.
Chapter 15 --- The Doors of Perception
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
William Blake*
*****
The following weeks fell into a pattern. Elrond, the twins, and their extended family of friends and advisors met for breakfast each morning to review the latest intelligence, hear a daily briefing from Ermehtar on security issues, and receive updates on the plans for the upcoming Convocation and Council meetings. Any dreams or visions either Seere or Elrond had were discussed. Urgent matters were debated and responses developed.
After breakfast, Elrond and Seere worked in the library or his study for much of the rest of the day. While Lindir assisted the seers with research, the two spent much of their time piecing together the heretofore disconnected threads of the history for the last several hundred years. Formal records had proved to be a rich source of information when viewed from this new perspective and, more often than not, they provided details that confirmed the accuracy of their visions. An intriguing pattern began to emerge as seemingly isolated incidents slipped into place, fitting like the pieces of a puzzle.
The history, coupled with the insight of the visions, showed that the attacks fell into three basic categories --- those designed to disrupt the security/communications of an area, those designed to distract attention from another location while another incident was taking place elsewhere, and those designed to locate and/or retrieve a specific item or individual.
Only recently did the attacks appear to be designed to destroy villages, drive families from their homes, and kill as many as possible. Gimli had made the ominous observation that this recent pattern was starting to take on the appearance of a sheep dog herding the flock into their pens to make the job of shearing and culling easier for the herders. The walled cities did indeed seem much like pens for those sheltered within their walls.
*****
They had been surprised to learn the number of people that had been captured in raids over the last three hundred years. Except for Imladris and Lorien’s archives, records from the other realms for further back were proving harder to obtain, so an exact count had not been made. Thus far, they had identified thirty-eight people that had been captured never to be seen again; twenty-one were elves, three hobbits, and the others human.
Most were local historians and lore masters with extensive knowledge in either the local history of an area or of Morgoth and Sauron. The rest were those gifted with strong magical or prophetic abilities. Celeborn and Erestor remembered hearing reports of some of these people being “lost” in attacks, but had not known they had been captured; the assumption had been made that they had been killed. Two had been elves that had served as advisors to Gil-Galad and were well known to the veterans of the Last Alliance. The news of their capture had been upsetting.
An accurate accounting of items seized in various raids had proven the most difficult to obtain. In most cases, those conducting the investigation had found no record or inventory that would indicate what information or artifact had been stored at a particular location. From the ransacked appearance of these sites, it seemed records had also been taken or destroyed. In all but a small handful of cases, those that had this knowledge had either died in the attack or been taken by the raiders.
Most troubling of all was that many of these individuals had been acknowledged experts on the history of Morgoth and Sauron or were the caretaker of some purportedly innocuous object or document related to one of the dark lords. Any object or document that had been deemed a danger had been destroyed in the years just after the Ring War. The value of what was left had been dismissed and the records detailing these items had gone missing in the years after Sauron’s defeat, thought exactly when was not known.
References to Morgoth and Sauron had become a reoccurring theme found in some fashion in all of the background reports of the missing. Some had been researching historical records about one or both, others had been studying their legacy of dark practices, and still others had helped defeat one or both. Mordor began to find its way out of the documents and into the discussions circulating around the ‘history puzzle’, as Elladan dubbed it.
Since the Ring War, Mordor had been uninhabited except for Nurn, the southern portion that had been given to the Sauron’s freed slaves. The heart of Sauron’s realm surrounding Orodruin and Barad-Dûr was still seen as evil by the free peoples and none wished to settle in the former stronghold of Sauron. Rohan and Gondor had assumed joint responsibility for its oversight and policing. While travel through those tainted lands was not expressly prohibited, the combined security force stopped any person or group found within it borders for questioning. Permanent settlements were not known to exist --- sanctioned or otherwise.
The records of the combined security force had noted periodic encounters with “nomadic bands of men of indeterminate origin” in or near the lands of Mordor beginning less than fifty years after the fall of Sauron. These sightings were reported in roughly the same locations decade after decade and had been occurring with growing frequency in the last three centuries. These ‘temporary camps’ had been investigated with varying degrees of vigor and corresponded to similar reports of ‘wandering camps’ or ‘landless vagabonds’ from other parts of Middle-earth.
These reports coincided with references to violent, but infrequent skirmishes with orcs and uruk hai on roads leading in and out of Orodruin and Barad-Dûr. They had been dismissed as nothing more than the last tattered remnants of Sauron’s army that had survived the war and the earthquakes that devastated Mordor after the one ring was unmade. Left without a master, they were seen as a nuisance to be ‘cleaned up’ rather than a threat to the long-term peace of Middle-earth.
Despite their contention that these bands were simply a few scattered survivors, the security force was still reporting these skirmishes, with increasing frequency, over 750 years after Sauron was defeated. More recent reports indicated that these bands now had contingents of humans fighting along side the fell beasts of Middle-earth. Further investigation of these reports had been infrequent, if they occurred at all. As the time between incidents was often thirty or more years in the beginning, they did not appear to be part of a larger, organized force. When they had actually became one was unclear as the records still ignored this probability.
The maps drawn from Seere’s dreams took on new significance as information about known attacks or reports of unexplained activities were noted on a map. Haldir had been the first to see the correlation between the information emerging on the history puzzle map and the locations marked on the second map Seere had seen in her vision. The second marked locations of abductions or the theft of some artifact. Until then, the significance of that map had not been clear. Only eleven sites shown on Seere’s map were not also marked on the mystery puzzle map. The significance of those sites was under investigation.
Individual reports or isolated attacks scattered over a span of hundreds of years appear singular when viewed from the perspective of the mortal; for immortals, a hundred years is but a moment in time and the repeating themes took on new significance, evidenced an organized pattern. Pouring over the maps and documents of the ‘history puzzle’, two facts were becoming clear --- sanctioned or not, Mordor appeared to be inhabited once again and the legacy of the Morgoth and Sauron appeared to be the unifying element.
*****
Erestor stood on the balcony outside the main library lost in his private thoughts. For almost 750 years, he had searched for clues of what might have happened to Laurea, his beloved wife. She had taken Seere for a visit to Gondor to introduce their young daughter to her old friend Arwen. Erestor had planned to accompany her on the journey, but a last minute breakdown in the negotiations for a trade alliance with Rohan had demanded his attention. This decision had lead to one of the few arguments of their married life and Laurea had left for Gondor without him.
Erestor had quickly resolved the dispute with the party from Rohan and had left for Gondor less than a week after her departure. He had ridden his small guard hard wanting to catch up to his wife’s party as soon as possible. To his dismay, he found his baby, his beloved Seere, in the protection of two-thirds of his wife’s travel guard with no sign of where his wife had gone.
Her cousin, Russe, had let the small security detail that had accompanied Laurea on what she had called ‘an urgent mission’ following the receipt of a message of unknown content from an unspecified sender. Her party had never been seen again. Their trail had quickly gone cold leaving few clues of their fate.
Torn between fear for the safety of his small child and the need to follow Laurea as soon as possible, Erestor had chosen to take Seere to Arwen before turning his focus to following his wife’s trail. He had always wondered if he made the right choice, if following her immediately would have produced a different result… if the few days it took to take Seere to safety allowed the trail to be lost to the elements.
He knew in his heart and in his mind that he had made the right choice. His baby daughter was helpless and they were exposed in the wilds of Gondor with only seven guards to defend her. Not knowing what had happened to Laurea and her guard had only heightened that worry.
No, he did not regret protecting his pen vuil; that was a father’s sacred duty and one he honored with great joy. No, that was not it. Guilt, however, did not require logic or reason to tear at a lover’s fëa when the one he loved was lost. The endless pain of his internal monologue had one refrain, “What if…?”.
He sat and listened as the others discussed those that had been taken. The stories of several of those lost sounded all too familiar. A sudden message not shared with anyone, a hurried departure with few if any guards, and then silence, a cold trail with no resolution to the question “Where did they go?”
/Has anyone else recognized the similarity to what happened with Laurea and her guard? We believe her twin brother to be the red-headed half-elf controlling these events, the pretender to the crown of dark lord. If Lhach is the one controlling the Hordes, it is not without a reasonable basis to suspect he might be behind Laurea’s disappearance as well. Is she the thirty-ninth captive identified thus far by the history puzzle?/
Sighing, Erestor’s grip on the railing tightened. /Lhach has always been jealous of Laurea’s gifts and she would fit the pattern of one with special magical and prophetic abilities; she and her twin are half Maia after all. He is one of the few that could have lured her away, convinced her to leave our child to the care of guards in the wilds of Gondor./
Looking out over the gardens of Imladris without seeing any of it, he tried to avoid asking himself the one question that plagued his fëa --- could her brother have killed her, his twin? The pain of his guilt, of his grief rose to grip his heart and he wondered yet again how he could continue.
A gentle hand came to rest on his right shoulder. Startled, he looked up to see the kind regard of his friend, the one that had been his greatest support in those grim days and beyond --- Celeborn. To his left, he felt a hand settle on his own where he gripped the railing. Warm silver gray eyes offered silent support. Two slender arms slipped around his waist and the familiar comfort of his daughter came to rest against his back. Without looking, he knew that the twins and Glorfindel hovered nearby.
Taking a deep, shaky breath he found the answer to one of his questions. /I will continue because I am not alone./
*****
A/N: Russe --- Sword-blade
A/N: * --- Cool piece of trivia – Aldous Huxley used this Blake quote in naming his book, “The Doors of Perception” (about his experiences during a peyote trip of all things). Jim Morrison so liked the book, he and his band-mates named their band the ‘Doors’. In their honor, I hummed a little ‘Riders on the Storm’ and ‘LA Woman’ while I wrote this chapter.
Hi. If anyone is reading this, I'd really appreciate some reviews. This is my first fic and I'd love to know what people think of it. Thanks!