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Episode 13

The Deadly Conspiracy

Irimë and Gráinne had been in Angband for three days before their eyesight finally got used to the dark.  Even Irimë's ring shone too brightly for her eyes, requiring her to light it less intensely.  Overlooking the ocean, they saw faces in the water that brought to the shoreline to investigate. There, they found an area they had not before seen, a precipice pocked with cave mouths.  Inward and out lurked wight servants of the necromancers, undertaking some macabre business in their subterrane crypts that the elf and daughter of Númenor could not fathom.  Gráinne & Irimë returned to the Halls and as they explored, they noticed that each stone had a face, twisted and writhing in grievous agony.  It seemed that Angband attacked their resolve at every turn.  

 

On the evening that the conspirators were to meet to carry out their patricidal deed, Irimë's son Aranwë -- or the wight of him -- collected the trays on which their food had been delivered during their stay. He led them past the pantry, where they sawthe remains of the cannibal that had been hauled before them on their first day in the Halls of the Necromancers, his flesh carved into fillets and lain upon the silver trays on which had been their daily meals.  The ghostly Ëalar of those who had betrayed Ilúvatar in life and served Morgoth and Sauron were now, in death, bound to Angband, possibly until the End of All Things.  The spirits fed on the abundant grief and horror of Gráinne & Irimë since they found themselves in this place.  Finally, the wight of Aranwë, led them to the necromancer's sons, who armed the pair with scimitars tempered to a muttering of lethal runes and inscribed afterwards with lethal death spells.  The eldest son, the mummified Uldulûg, stood in silent observation, wielded a sword that created a ghostly double of him such that the observer could barely tell which was the wielder and which was the simulacrum.  The threshold of the Necromancer's chamber was barred only by a black arras wrought with the signs of night in silver, and bordered with a repetition of the five names of the Lord of Bones in scarlet thread: Gorthaur, Sauron, Artano, Aulendil and Annatar.  The drapes of the chamber were fashioned of bodies blasphemously hung.  No flames arose from the myriad lamps, though shadows brimmed the place like a spectral fluid.  Great censers of incense, alembics of distillates and braziers of heated coals seemed to quiver like animate things.  

 

The conspirators threw themselves at the Necromancer, seeming to catch him unaware as he sat on an iron trivet over a brazier, meditating in front of a triangular mirror, flaming brightly in the shadows as if lit by some splendor of unknown force, its frame wrought from electrum and held obliquely aloft by a serpentining copper arm.  Suddenly, Uldulûg, turned on the rest of the conspirators and fought for his father!  A bloody mêlée ensued and the conspirators finally slew the Necromancer and his eldest son, but the father's entrails snaked toward them and continued to fight, along with his weasel familiar.  Finally, physically and mentally spent, the conspirators emerged victorious.  The middle son, Vakúl, burned his father's corpse on a pyre, but a wind blew his dusty remains over everything.  Thereafter, swirls of ash rose up underfoot and no mount of sweeping ever made the place clean.

© 2013 by Rob P.  All rights reserved.

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