A War of Horses
WARNING: Triggering warning, nothing happens but attempted and panic from being trapped by strangers with ill intent and flashback panic of being tortured. Nothing is explicit but panic attacks are an old friend of mine so I'm not sure how realistic it will come off.
KEYnote: I love Tolkien but born where he was… there is some iffiness that —as someone who studies colonialism— I'm not entirely comfy with. So you'll notice some changes, take it as a world shift that the Race of Men were all pushed further south as the dragons, ents, dwarves, hobbits, and even elves began holding on and reclaiming their homelands.
Chapter 13 - The War of Horses
When they passed the Gap of Rohan, they all learned why exactly Estel and Gandalf had hesitated in taking them in this direction. For while they had made unprecedented time only to run into arms of a full-scale war.
And suddenly, Luna was thrown back into hell.
Unlike in Erebor, there was nowhere to retreat, nowhere to hide.
Nor in the middle of this chaos, where the air was adorned with blood and the screams of men and equine, could she bring herself to flee even if she could have.
They were lucky enough to be on the side of Rohan, while the armies of orcs with white handprints over their mutated faces, blue-eyed grunts from the South clamped down on the Rohanin.
It was a slaughter.
That was until Harry wrested the earth from its slumber and the wind from its course. In the light of him, the earthen and elemental power of him, the orcs retreated back from which they had come.
It was a power that had never belonged to him in the Lands of Exile, at least in her memory, but it suited. The Valar had given him to Middle Earth, to help purge the disease of raw evil that spread like cancer throughout the land.
Dimly, she noticed the company, dimly she saw Estel and Harry lead a charge into the war.
Dimly, Legolas fell back to protect the hobbits as the men and wizards took to the battle.
She heard her name called, over and over again. But she merely leaned over the horse's mane and called to the wind in a wordless plea.
But as the war moved north, the ring of magic, the call to arms, and the enraged cries of the orcs were forced ruthlessly back when they had been on the cusp of victory before the wizards and the King of Men arrived.
She let out a wholly different cry, one for the horses who skittered across the blood sodden dirt, who lost their riders, who lost their way.
They wanted a direction, they wanted out, and Luna gave them that out. To her cry the horses answered. Those who had lost their masters dashed toward her. Soon a near stampede was running through the midline of the armies behind her. There were no orc horses, but there were from the South of the South, and some of their mounts who were not as valued as the steads of the Rohanin bucked their riders to follow her. She brought them east, to fields where the war was nothing but a distant burst of thunder.
She turned her horse, whose breathing was heavy but not so heavy to not make another run. She slapped a rump of one of the more dominant females, and the herd took off deeper into the fields.
Returning to the battlefield was her mistake.
Though she managed to gather another herd to herself, a few of the men from the south managed to keep their seats.
"Luna!" she heard Haldir call to her.
But he was too far away.
She was able to duck at the sword cut over her head, the mare beneath her stepping to the side, avoiding the second strike. However, the man reached out his free hand and grabbed her free flowing hair.
She grunted and she was pulled off her seat, only her strength and years of travel allowed her to land on her feet, and she began to run to keep from being trampled beneath or dragged by her hair. Luna didn't fight the man as he dragged her up onto the saddle, but once she was in his lap she went for the bastard's eyes.
In answer, he brought the hilt of his sword down in a blow to her temple, hard enough that she saw black and felt the not unfamiliar feel of blood spilling down the side of her face.
She must have lost time because the next thing she knew they were no longer in the heart of the herd but behind enemy lines.
There were hands on her as she struggled to right herself, to stand on the ground she was being pushed down.
It was only when one of the men pulled at her collar did she realised they didn't want to kill her.
Luna Lovegood had been tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange, as well as the Lestrange brothers, and MacNair, but their intent had been pain.
Not this.
Not this volition, something that she had never honestly thought about too deeply. After all, she had never craved any person, she had never fallen in love, never known attraction, and never seen the appeal of it.
So that these strangers, these monsters, warmongers, would even think to lay a hand on her, to look at her, was a violation; an outrage.
Luna had never felt hate as she felt it at that moment, had never known such pain on her mind, on her soul; on her very being. She would die before she allowed them to take that which she had no will to give.
Pain and humiliation she had been before born before and could have endured again.
But in this moment, she felt something in her snap and cut free from reality.
She rose from the earth with a strength that she did know she possessed. She wrenched her arm up, instinct guiding her hand around a hilt of one of the men's discarded swords and sliced the man who touched her collar from chest to throat.
She roared, her voice rising in fury, ending in a scream cut from the heart of her as if she herself were a dragon made elf.
She understood then, the vengeance of dragons, the rage they possessed toward the arrogance of man who would try to tame them and cage them.
How dare they?
How dare they!?
She spun in a sick mimicry of a dance, marked by death and scarlet. And when the garnet of their blood marked her, dirtied her skin, her hair, and stained her clothes, she became hate.
Hate that beat through her like the dwarven drums of war.
Hate like dragon fire to burn away the world.
Man had made her into this.
Man and their disgusting desires and their obsession with destruction and denomination until the thing they coveted was destroyed by their own hands. Destroyed from ignorance or spite, to pollute the world with their sickness.
She hated them, she hated them. She hated the elven traitor who had given her to them, hated the human mother who killed herself in the name of discovery, and hated the father who had betrayed her, in a vain attempt to protect her.
Xenophilius had been a coward, no better than any other human who picked away at her until she knew nothing but shame for loving the world that seemed committed to setting itself aflame.
Because men fought for only two reasons; greed or survival, and the latter only when they had no choice.
And she hated herself for the blood she spilt, for degrading herself like this, for their lives were less than swine. They came at her like demons, like orcs or trolls with just as much evil in their twisted minds.
She would have welcomed death, but if mankind had one fault outside of greed, it was pride.
To their eyes, she was but a girl, who had dared to set foot on the land they sought to conquer.
She hated them, and as they overwhelmed her, her anger overcame her further, she was suddenly back in the Malfoy Manor, back on the grounds of Hogwarts.
Hurting and killing against her will.
Again, she screamed.
Not for fear but in defiance.
If she could have breathed fire, she would have turned them all to ash.
oOo
Haldir had never been so afraid as the moment he watched a man grab Luna by her long hair. She was too far away from him as he spurred his horse forward, he was reluctant to dismount as Elledan's horses were among the swiftest he had ever encountered.
He had been amazed at how Luna had called to the horses and how they had flocked to her. If the dragons hadn't been enough of an indication she was gifted as the first elves who taught the trees to speak and befriended the first horses, this was certainly lore brought to life.
But she had moved too fast, and the war had come upon them too swiftly. They had been meant to ride behind the Rohan lines, only to be met with the unexpected siege from the South.
The company had scattered. Merry and Pippin had stayed with the wizards as the Black and the Gray road north against a force that they could not have been out ran, not if the earth's fastest horse could have been seated by the Ring Burier.
Still, Legolas had stayed with Frodo as Boromir had stayed with Samwise, in an attempt to weave through the chaos. Gimli and Estel had joined the fray. But from there, Haldir had lost track.
Luna had taken headlong into the battle, and fate seemed to keep Haldir from her side as he followed, blessedly to the undisputed fields east of the battle.
A blessing that was short lived as she purposely spooked the horses urging them further east as she turned back to the West, back toward war.
Haldir cursed as he fought against the tide of equine bodies to get to the princess's side.
Thranduil would be driven to an early grave when he realized that drakes were probably the least of his worries when it came to his children's safety.
Haldir had almost caught up to her when Luna inadvertently called not just the horses of the southern people to her, but their riders as well. What followed happened in the span of minutes though for Haldir they passed in agonizing decades.
Luna was pulled into a rider's lap, managing in a move that would do any elven warrior proud. She did not go like some village lass unaccustomed to the violence of the world but raised her hands to claw at her aggressor's eyes and throat, only for the man to strike her in the temple causing her to go momentarily limp.
Haldir would see him dead for laying so much as a thought on her.
Again, fate seemed to keep them apart as the group of men who captured Luna shot off toward the edge of the battle where the fighting had moved on for lack of room to stand that was not strewn with discarded bodies and weapons.
Haldir was forced to abandon his mount that would not run on the bodies, many still warm as death was slow to claim them.
Haldir did not have such reservations as he sprinted to the only being his heart had ever sung for.
He heard Luna's roar that ended in a shriek, it was a sound unlike any he had heard before and it pierced him through like a javelin. Within those last few passes between them, he knew that he would never forgive himself for not having been faster.
She did not fight like an elven warrior, she fought like a drake, like flame given steel. But the men outnumbered her ten to one.
She screamed again, and continued to scream, not from fear but from betrayal. Soul deep and broken, as if the spirit had bones that could be sundered.
It was a sound, a memory that would haunt his nightmares for years to come.
But the Valar had not deserted them completely, for Haldir finally caught up to them, and before they could take advantage of the elleth whose blade they had knocked aside, he relieved them quite graciously of their miserable heads.
The last of the men he pulled away from the princess and he stabbed him through the ribs, tossing them carelessly aside.
He was thankful when Luna's eyes registered him, and without reaching for her, she slammed into his side.
At which point her mount, who had followed her doggedly through the chaos came to them. Haldir wrapped an arm securely around her which was almost unneeded for how hard she clung to him. He was able to mount in a single bound, and he turned the horse northeast.
He did not care how furious she might become with him for breaking with the Fellowship.
He had seen elves —male and female alike— break from such happenings. She was too young and her past endurances did not necessarily make her stronger, it perhaps deepened the danger. The mind healed less cleanly than a bone left unset.
What infuriated Haldir further were the lies that had reached Lothlórien and Imladris. These men from the south were not foreigners, their blue eyes reflecting that these were men of Gondor who had deserted their people as the other races, particularly dwarves and ents, rose in number, forcing wanders to find other ambitions for expansion.
The answer to why southerners would join a war not their own was finally revealed; these were jealous and opportunistic deserters born in Middle Earth among a population where the men vastly outnumbered their women.
It was a fear elves and dwarves had always had about the race of men, who sometimes valued their women as a mere token resource, not as equals who were essential to their survival as their ability to erect shelter and cultivate food.
No, human women died at alarming rates, and rather than take greater care of their health and lessen their burdens, the men allowed them to fade, even at the cost of losing their young. It created imbalances like this, where men ran to war to take that which they could not protect.
It was among man's greatest faults, that they valued their sons more than their daughters, that they valued the ability to wage war more than the capability to preserve life.
Perhaps he was being uncharitable, but Haldir had a hard time remaining reasonable as Luna shook in his arms like a leaf born torn at by a winter wind.
He did not stop until they reached the Onodló River.
Luna did not sleep nor did she raise her face from where she pressed into his chest.
oOo
AN: Did you think I was going to follow the script like 98% of LOTR fics? I mean things proceed accordingly, but we're pulling a Witcher with our side quests :D I'll show you the wizard showdown next but then we are following the elves!
Thoughts, iguanas, or feedback, pretty please?