Angmar: The Northern Lands

[Lokktar]

Snak saw it ever since she was a girl. She knew no one else did. As a child you do not question The Anar, the Isil. Why would she have any cause to question this third body. The ball rose every three moons... every three and three parts out of four moons. It rose resplendent in its rings. With the Anar and Isil, they looked nothing more than disks. But this third body was clearly a ball. She could see it even through the pines. Stripes and storms raged across its surface. And the rings sometimes blotted out the entire sky. Snak was afraid the Arda would fall in some nights.

When she asked her elders about it they took it for child fantasy. North wood orcs were allowed and encouraged to let their minds wander and to dwell in the fantastic. Eating odd plants and fungus from the forest was not uncommon. But as she grew and kept speaking so vividly about this gaseous Giant apparition worries grew too.

Her tribe took her to a witch. To that crone that lived in the cliff-side pockets. They spoke about taking her to the Kagam Khazads even. Those horrible dwarf magicians. She learned to stop asking and they soon forgot. But the Giant did not stop appearing like the works of some horrible clock.

Snak squatted at her fire with a piece of rabbit boiling on the camp stove. Anar was blotted out by the Giant leaving the morning tepid. She was three days into the Ered Mithrim and far north of her woods tribe. She knew she did not have much time. Whatever had fallen from that Giant's rings three nights ago into the Northern Waste was sure to attract others to this part of the Arda. She needed to get to it first.

[Lokktar]

She had found the husk in a burned out clearing in the paltry trees just into the Forodwaith. She had found the girl not long after under a shelter of silvervine brambles. She was unlike anything Snak had seen in her 26 summers on the Arda. It took some time to gain the girl's trust. Time Snak felt she did not have. For she was sure that other creatures would soon be upon them. Others who had seen the object fall from the colossal field of rocks and dust that blotted out the day. She had not met any such creatures in all her years. But she was deeply afraid they were out there.

The girl had snow white eyes. On her head grew the start of two shafts of antler like that which crowned the great stags in the North. They grew larger every day. Her clothes were rags and her language was strange. It sounded like the language of the stars from Snak's deepest fever dream. She could make out no meaning in those words, but the two had just started to develop the bones of a sign language between them. Snak knew a bit of the trade sign from her dealings with the rogue dwarfs in the North.

The girl seemed of age with Snak. Or more likely, she did not seem to be far from Snak's age. Or any age for that matter. How many summers had she seens? 12? 20? 40? Did they have summers where this girl was from? And where was she from? Snak had no way as of yet to ask these questions. She pondered how to tell the girl she would need to saw off her antlers in order to bring her back into the South. Back to society where people did not have dreams of giant balls of gas ringed with gold and silver and dust that dropped seedpods containing antlered girls onto the Arda. But that conversation could come in a few days yet. They had probably a week before they were back into the territories of the Northern orc tribes. Snak had trapped some feral hill goats and planned to ride them back home.

They barely needed a fire the first few nights. As the heat of the gas giant subsided as it slipped from reality, Snak realized that the girl herself had a sort of radiance of her own. Like the dull dark heat of some distant star emanating from her strange person. They sat and stared at each other as the night was overtaken with more tangible stellar bodies. The gas giant would soon be gone from her world for a few months leaving Snak alone with this strange girl from the stars.