You Must Have Faith

Chapter Ten

Thranduil stalked down the hallway, back towards his throne room.  His face was stoic, but his mind was whirling.  Did I make the right decision?  What if she dies there?  No.  Thranduil, you're being ridiculous, this is the best thing for everyone involved, she's the best bet out of everyone to get the information you need.  He told himself firmly, resolutely shutting down his train of thought and instead focusing on some papers on his desk in relation to the upkeep of the kingdom.

Vera bounded through the tree branches, weaving through webs and taking care to avoid any spiders that might give away her location.  The air grew colder the farther south she went, in contrast to the usual assumption that it got warmer the farther south you went.  It seemed as though the air itself was whispering in her ear, cold and malicious as it tugged at her fur and nipped the tips of her ears.  

She refused to be daunted, and kept going, not making a sound as she reached the edge of the trees after over an hour of traveling and peered up at the fortress, dark grey stone pillars reaching up into the cloudy sky.  There was strong magic there, but she herself was a child of magic and so she could see through some of it, though most of it was a dark magic far stronger than anything that she had felt before.  The fur on the back of her neck rose as a dark laugh seemed to echo through her mind, taunting her, but she shook it off as a figment of her imagination.  Looking around, Vera realized just how dangerous infiltrating the fortress was going to be.  The only realistic access to it was a single stone bridge that lay below her tree branch.  

Thranduil is a fool if he thinks that I can get in and out of there without being detected, she growled to herself, knowing that she would have to try regardless of how foolhardy it was.  With a sigh of acceptance, she slipped down the tree and slunk across the bridge, staying low to the ground and moving as quickly and fluidly as she could.  Once she reached the entrance she immediately hugged the walls, keeping in the shadows as much as she could as she crept towards the middle of Dol Guldor.

The sound of maniacal laughter reached her ears, and she headed in that direction, despite her tail fluffing up in fear.  The stone was so cold that it bit her feet, causing her ears to flick in annoyance as she kept going.  Vera finally emerged out onto a small ledge that looked out over a large courtyard that was completely filled with orcs.  Laughing, talking, eating, fighting, orcs.  She could smell them from where she lay on the ledge, nose crinkling in disgust.  

What felt like hours but in reality was only a few minutes passed as she counted, gathering rough estimates of how many orcs there were.  She backed off the ledge and crawled in another direction, sniffing carefully to avoid traps.  The stone hallways were small, tall but very narrow, leading her to take the calculated risk of changing forms into a human.  She wandered about the fortress randomly, trusting her instincts and picking up random bits of information from over-heard conversations in Black Speech.  Thank the Valar I took the time to learn that horrid tongue, she thought.

An hour had passed since she arrived, and so far she had managed to avoid detection.  Climbing up and down walls, jumping over deep crevasses, and ducking into tiny holes in the rock whenever she heard anything suspicious near-by her.  She crawled up into a small watch-tower, peering out the window, which opened into what appeared to have previously been the prison's kitchen/dining room but was now just another large open space.  Vera tucked her brightly colored hair into her hood before peering out of the window and examining the area below her and its occupants.  There weren't any orcs this time, instead it was full of massive trolls, the kind that were genetically engineered specifically for war and could handle the light of the sun.  

She left the watchtower after estimating the number of trolls and padded down the hallway, making very little noise with her soft leather boots but still more than she would have liked.  After a couple of hundred feet the hallway abruptly ended in a large opening, where part of the building had crumbled away.  Looking out of this opening, she realized that the rubble from the building had been moved, creating a barracks of sorts that was filled with goblin mercenaries.

There are so many of them.

By now she was terrified, knowing that the creatures of her nightmares were surrounding her, her mind began to play tricks on her, flashing snippets of submerged memories over her line of sight.

No.  She growled angrily to herself.  I refuse to be incapacitated here.  I must continue, if I am to keep everyone alive.  No matter the cost.

With this new resolution in mind, she pressed onward, eventually realizing that she had gone in a giant circle through Dol Guldor and had ended up back at the ledge over the orcs' courtyard.  To her surprise, there was an entirely new group of orcs there, with a different scent and a different marking on their armor.  Whereas the orcs from before had a red eye on their armor, these had a white hand, and there were fewer of them, although they were larger and seemed more intelligent than the others.  

There has to be at least 5,000 orcs here, not counting any I may have missed, not to mention a couple hundred trolls, however many thousands of goblins, and any wargs they may have sequestered somewhere.  She mused in dismay.

There was also a change in the layout of the courtyard.  One of the tables had been moved into the center of the room, with a wide open area around it.  On top of it lay the body of what looked to be a deer of some type, though it was impossible to tell since it had been skinned and beheaded.  She decided to stay and see why this new change had been made, and then leave directly afterwards since the amount of danger she was in increased massively by the minute.

As the minutes ticked by she became more and more nervous, tensing and fighting the urge to jump whenever a noise reached her ears, and she was constantly looking over her shoulder.  After ten stressful minutes ticked by she was on the verge of jumping up and running for the trees, especially since she had heard the orcs below talking about a strangely human scent that they had caught a whiff of in the hallways.  She began to back away from the ledge when a peculiar silence fell over the crowd below.  She inched forwards again, watching carefully.

The orcs moved as one, standing and lining the walls of the courtyard in neat rows, all standing at attention and giving the massive double-doors a wide berth.  The double-doors themselves opened, pushed by two orcs who then stood at attention to either side of the doors.  After a short, tension filled pause, a large shadow filled the doorway.

A/N:  Just thought I would leave you with a lovely little cliffhanger, teehee.  Who do you guys think is going to come through the door?  Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear all of your thoughts, no matter how crazy they may or may not be.  Vote if you liked it, I update every Tuesday.  Love you guys!