After helping the young necromancers Vakúl and Vagarn kill their father and eldest brother, Gráinne and Irimë fell into a long, somnolent, fugue.  Time passed, but to what extent and toward whither they could not tell.  Their will waned and their actions, while still their own, were directed by the sorcerous and lascivious whims of the young necromancers. 

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Elsewhere, Ekhart the Builder and Faolan the Ranger of the Foraoise Daoine had wandered the Halls of Angband for 10 years, fighting in solidarity against the deep horrors of Angband.  They searched in vain for Gráinne and Irimë or for the exit to the open air.  The cthonic labyrinths seemed to twist and roil around them, changing shape and direction though they had trodden the same ground countless times.  Eventually, they found, or were found by the imps, some lesser form of goblin that slinked maliciously through the darkest underpasses, fearing even the goblins.  The craven creatures revealed to Ekhart and Faolan that they had seen in some indeterminate bygone year a pair of maidens clad in warriors' coverings row to an island in in some subjacent nether-lake.  Faolan and Eckhart elicited clues from the imps that directed them on a month-long journey to a darkling mere as still and unflowing as a millpond.  They built a raft and constructed a lantern from an Orc helm and denatured Orc fat, which they used to find acrid shores populated by carrion divers and spirits of the dead.  Following the footprints on the sands, they made their way into the Halls of the Necromancers to find everything covered in a charnel ash and the redolence of death.

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Ekhart and Faolan explored the passages of the great hall until they found a bed chamber containing a tome bound in human skin and a scimitar of black metal tempered with fiendish runes beseeching the aid of dark gods of death with deeds of regicide and patricide.  In the cabinets, they found a lifeless mannequin sewn of more than a score of human faces hung beside. .  a set of feminine robes, which they recognized as the Elvish vestments of Irimë.  In wax, upon a polished mirror, they saw, written in the Tengwar script and the Sindarin tongue, "no stars for three years."  Eventually, Ekhart and Faolan descended into the subterranean chambers of the great Hall and found Gráinne and Irimë there in languorous and licentious servitude to Vakúl and Vagarn.  Faolan loosed arrows at the sorcerers and, nicking their flesh, released Gráinne and Irimë from their thrall.  The four united against the necromancers and defeated them, and then destroyed the castle.  They departed the deathly isle and followed the directions relayed to them by the imps.  Within days, they found the caves and tunnels of the wights, and emerged from the barrows into the light of day for the first time in a decade.