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Should we let the silence last? Why tell them what they want to know? They did not dare to stand with us upon the Chill Mountain and defy the Dark Enemy of the World...
Beyond the sight or thought of Endamir or Lomwe, who stood motionless, absorbed in alert alistening, the two soldiers lurked. Soldiers still in profession, though in sight they were nothing more than a pair of rusting torch brackets. Rusting slowly, admittedly, considering their age; and occasionally they scraped a fraction to one side, and the grating noise would echo in the bastion, disrupting the still harmony. The small bats, living high in the gables of the bastion's tower, would hear the disturbance and huddle closer to each other, mothers covering batlings with a protective membrane wing.
Long ago the bats had followed the Foul Ones as they surged into the broken fortress, the Fair Ones all gone on their great horses. The bats knew that where the Fair Ones had driven them off with flame, the Foul Ones were indifferent to them, which was what they preferred. As a result, they followed the Dark Lord's armies, peaceable creatures in the main, searching for quiet corners, but ruled by bloated vampire-fiends that they feared and obeyed.
But the fortress had resisted the Foul Ones in an unexpected manner. For the inhabitants were not all gone. There were pockets of light and arrows singing, and strange glittering fire soared from a bastion in the east. And even after the Eldar were slain, their memories clung to swords, to masonry, to empty torch brackets. Now the Foul and Fair Ones and vampires and the Dark Lord were all gone, but a memory of terror lay within the twisted metal lumps.
You are being foolish and ungenerous, the other bracket replied. The Seneschal would be ashamed of you. Some of us still remember what it was to be Elven.
The bracket on the right veered violently to one side, and the echo shrieked about, startling Endamir and Lomwe. For many more minutes they heard more strange sounds, scratchings and dim crashes and howls of the omnipresent freezing wind. Then a voice they could understand sounded, in the antique Quenyan of Himring's court.
"I am Idrahil, the Seneschal. I bid you welcome, friends. Climb further up, and I shall speak to you in the shade-you cannot see me where the sun's rays are too bright."
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