[Year 1155 of the Trees]
[Greenwood borders. Night]
The night was quiet, the forest wildlife undisturbed. Perfect conditions for a routine patrol.
A squad of six Quendi moved through the branches toward their camp, their steps light and practiced. They'd been running this perimeter for weeks, the same circuit, the same trees, the same reassuring silence.
At the camp's edge, they exchanged brief reports with the three sentries on watch, then passed inside and dispersed to their evening tasks. Some prepared sleeping spots among the great roots. Others set about heating food over carefully banked coals.
The familiar rhythms of camp life, repeated so many times they required no thought.
Of the nineteen Quendi in the patrol, six remained on watch while the others settled into the hollow beneath an ancient oak. The commander was the last to lie down.
He couldn't sleep.
Something prickled at the back of his neck, that animal sensation of being watched, though every sweep of the treeline revealed nothing but darkness and the faint rustle of leaves.
He held still. Listened.
Wind through canopy. The distant call of a night-bird. The soft breathing of his sleeping patrol.
Nothing.
He was about to return to his bedroll when something struck the back of his head, and the world went black.

{ image: A Nandor patrol camp }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Cold water shocked him awake.
Sputtering and blinking, the commander opened his eyes and took stock. They were still in camp. But now all his patrol members lay bound beside him.
Some were already conscious, their faces showing fear and wary calculation as they studied their captors.
The figures surrounding them were tall. Wrapped in cloaks that seemed woven from living leaves, armed with bows and swords of unfamiliar make. They moved with a casual efficiency that suggested absolute confidence in their control of the situation.
Six stood in plain view, but the commander had no doubt others lurked in the shadows between the trees.
A cold thought seized him: what kind of creature could approach Quendi in a forest undetected?
The warnings of the Ainu Oromë rose in his mind. Tales not of orcs, but of worse servants of the Enemy. Things that hunted in silence. Could these be those terrible beings?
But surely they would have sensed such monsters. Quendi could feel the presence of true evil.
Unless these were spirits. Beings beyond the physical. Untouchable by mortal weapons.
The thought took root and spread, coiling tighter with every heartbeat. His mind spiraled. What weapons could harm a spirit? None. What defense existed against the incorporeal? None. If these were servants of the Enemy sent to—
Something cracked against the back of his skull.
Pain flared bright and immediate, scattering his thoughts. The clearing snapped back into focus. The bound bodies. The leaf-cloaked figures. The woman standing over him with her hand still raised.
"I asked you a question," she said flatly.
He blinked twice.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
"Who you be? How many you here?"
The woman spoke again, using the ancient tongue of the Quendi. Halting, as if pulling half-forgotten words from deep memory. She supplemented her broken speech with ósanwë, mind-images that filled the gaps her words could not.
Through the mental connection, the commander sensed no malice from these strangers.
Just curiosity.
Deciding to take a chance, he answered in both the ancient tongue and his native Telerin, bolstered by ósanwë of his own.
"We are Quendi of the Nandor people. Nineteen hunters in our patrol. We guard our forest's borders and hunt. Our settlement lies by the river."
"I caught only part of that," said a third figure. Male, his voice deep and resonant.
"Not surprising." The woman who'd asked the questions switched to a language the commander didn't recognize. "That was the first tongue of the Quendi, the one we all spoke before the Sundering. Most of our people weren't even born then."
Hearing the unfamiliar speech, the patrol commander tensed.
Only then did it register that many of their captors were women.
Not unheard of. Women hunted and guarded among the Nandor as well. But rarely did they stand so openly in command, issuing orders that grown warriors obeyed without hesitation.
The figures exchanged a few words in their strange tongue. Then the one who clearly led them turned back to him.
"Who be Nandor?" she asked.
The question stunned every bound elf in the camp.
Thoughts raced through their minds: They're clearly not Eldar. Could they truly be dark creatures? Some unknown race? An unknown people of the Quendi? But they know the ancient speech. Perhaps…
"We be Quendi and we be Nandor," the commander managed, fumbling for ancient words his tongue had nearly forgotten, slipping into Telerin when memory failed him.
"We be Teleri in Great March, but before Ered…" He used the old word for mountains. "We be Nandor, Turned Back, and be here. You be Avari, Refused before Great March, at Lake?"
"They turned back?" The male figure sounded incredulous. "During the March of the Eldar?"
"I only caught 'Last Ones,' 'Turned Back,' and 'Refused,'" another woman's voice said.
"We should find out which kindred these Quendi belong to."
The leader thought for a moment, then pointed at the bound Nandor and spoke slowly.
"You be Vanyar? You be Minyar? You be Nelyar?"
The commander's face broke into a smile of relief. These were words every Quendi knew.
"Nelyar! We be Nelyar! Nelyar be Teleri!"
"Well now." The figures exchanged glances. "Looks like our Third Kindred really are the Last Ones."
"So they're our kin by tribe?" The male voice carried genuine surprise.
"Look at their hair," the second woman observed. "Silver-fair, like our own folk."
"They're a bit on the scrawny side." The man's voice turned doubtful. "Shorter than us, too. We were practically dancing around their camp, and they didn't even twitch an ear. Orcs they'd hear and smell from a league away, sure. But those same orcs would crush these twigs in close combat."
"Means they rely on ambushes and archery. Hit and run. Fine in the woods, useless in a stand-up fight."
"We need to send a runner back to the caravan." The translator-leader's tone went cold. "Let the Chief and the councils decide what comes next."
She turned slightly toward one of her own.
"Angrod. I'm leaving this with you."
For a heartbeat, her gaze lingered on him. Steady. Trusting. Of all her scouts, he was the only one she would entrust with something this important.
Angrod inclined his head once, then vanished into the forest, carrying the weight of first contact with him.
"What about these ones?" the man asked.
The bound Nandor strained to understand the foreign speech, catching only fragments, studying their captors' faces for any hint of intent.
"Maybe we could play Circle with them, Celestia?" purred a woman standing nearby, drawing chuckles from the others.
"Yes! Test how strong they are!" A younger male voice, eager and bright.
"No."
The leader's tone dropped another degree, and every figure around her snapped to attention.
"Blindfold them, gag them, tie them properly, and put them all in one tent where they won't be underfoot until new orders arrive."
At her signal, one of the figures simply vanished into the shadows.
The commander's eyes went wide. He'd never seen anyone move that fast.
After that, he saw nothing at all. A cloth covered his eyes, and rough hands dragged him into a tent alongside his patrol.

{ image: Silent scouts in the leaves }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Avari column. Same period]
[Selas POV]
Our scouts had found the Nandor a day earlier.
By the time I received the report, Celestia had already taken them alive, which was precisely what I would have ordered. She knew better than anyone that dead prisoners answer no questions.
The interrogations told us what we needed to know.
These Quendi were a splinter of the Great Journey. The very tail end of the last column, which had been composed entirely of our Nelyar kin. That's why our Third Kindred earned the name Teleri: "The Last Ones."
Many of the Teleri still used an older self-name among their own kind. Lindar, "the Singers." A tradition that predated the Journey itself.
Some of these Last Ones had balked at the towering peaks of the Hithaeglir, the Misty Mountains. They'd refused to continue and chosen to remain in the forests along the Anduin.
So it turned out exactly the way I remembered.
Whether from cowardice or wisdom, they'd since spread slowly across Rhovanion. The Eldar called them Nandor, "those who turn aside from the road."
In our harsher Avari shorthand, the name had formed on its own: the Turned Back. Their leader was Lenwë, the one who'd first refused the crossing.
He was Denethor's father.
This should be an interesting family reunion.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
We examined the Nandor camp. Took a good look at the captives themselves.
They'd clearly never faced orcs in any serious way, and their development lagged far behind ours. They stood shorter. Their frames lean, like soft metal that had never been forged through battle and hardship.
Grazers, not predators.
Looking at them, it became obvious just how much the Light and our training had changed us.
And yet these same peaceful forest-dwellers would survive and thrive in this backwater while the "advanced" Eldar tore each other apart over Silmarils in Beleriand.
There was something to be said for staying out of Morgoth's sight.
Which meant we should cultivate good relations.
The region itself was excellent. The vast forests of Rhovanion, the mightiest river in Middle-earth, the Misty Mountains and Grey Mountains nearby. Erebor to the east, the Celduin nearly connecting to the Anduin through the Forest River that ran through Greenwood.
A perfect location for a kingdom and a foothold in Middle-earth.
But it was already occupied. And assimilating with the Nandor would be problematic, as we'd grown too different.
The Avari needed free land we could call our own.
A new home. A new homeland.
In the end, we released the prisoners, apologized for the rough treatment, established proper contact, and asked them to serve as guides through their forests.
Our column moved on, pushing through the dense woodland toward the Anduin.
We were to meet Lenwë along the way.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Several weeks later. Nandor settlement on the Anduin]
[Lenwë Witness POV]
The runners had been coming for days now, each one more breathless than the last.
A great column. Thousands of Quendi, yet not Eldar. Speaking a tongue no one recognized. Moving in ordered ranks. Traveling with beasts and wagons and things no Nandor had ever seen.
Lenwë sat on the root of the great oak where he held his councils and listened to the latest report, turning each detail over in his mind like a river stone.
Avari. The Refused.
He'd thought about them sometimes, over the long years. The ones who'd stayed at the Lake. He'd assumed they were dead. Or scattered.
Not this.
"How many?" he asked the runner.
"Thousands, my lord. At least three thousand, maybe more. With animals. With children." The young hunter's eyes were still wide. "They travel in a line that stretches back into the forest as far as I could see."
Three thousand. The Nandor numbered perhaps half that, spread across dozens of settlements.
"And their warriors?"
The runner swallowed. "Their warriors march in formation, my lord. Like nothing I've ever seen. Hundreds of them, moving as one body. They have shields that cover a whole person, head to foot, and weapons made of a yellow metal that I don't recognize."
Bronze, Lenwë thought. He'd heard the word from the oldest among them, the ones who remembered Oromë's teachings about the craft of metals. A harder thing than copper, though not as hard as iron.
"Send word to Denethor," Lenwë said. "Tell him to come. Now."
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Two days later]
When word came that the column had emerged from the trees and made camp on the riverbank near the settlement, Lenwë gathered his council and went to see for himself.
Nothing had prepared him for what he found.
The camp sprawled across the shore like a small city. Tents and wagons arranged in neat rows. Groups of figures moving with purpose between the structures. Everything organized in a way that spoke of long practice and deep discipline.
Lenwë stopped at the edge of the treeline.
They were Quendi. That much was certain. The shape of the ears, the cast of the features. But they were also something else entirely. Taller than his own folk. Broader in the shoulder. Men and women alike carried themselves with a confidence that bordered on arrogance, their movements efficient and controlled.
He watched a company of warriors run through a drill, shields raised, spears thrusting in unison, their feet stamping the earth in perfect rhythm. The sound of it echoed across the water like distant thunder.
How?
The question lodged in his mind and wouldn't leave. How had the Refused, the ones left behind without guidance or protection, without Oromë's weapons or the Valar's light, become this?
All around him, his people were already mingling with the strangers.
A group of Nandor children had gathered around one of the massive wagons, eyes wide as an Avari woman demonstrated how the wheels turned on their axles. She spoke slowly, using hand gestures when words failed to bridge the gap between their tongues.
"It carries everything," she was saying, pointing at the covered bed. "Food and tools, and even children when the road is hard."
The children clustered closer, peering at the canvas and the broad wooden frame as if it might start moving on its own. The woman rested a hand on the wagon's side.
"We don't drag it with our arms," she added, nodding toward the harnessed horse standing patiently between the shafts. "She pulls. Stronger than any of us, and smarter than you'd think. Treat them well and they'll carry your whole world without complaint."
A few of the children glanced at the animal with new caution, as if meeting a person for the first time.
"When the rain turns the ground to mud, when someone's ankle gives out, when the little ones can't keep up anymore, this is what keeps the column moving."
One of the boys edged closer. "I wish I could ride in that," he blurted in halting Telerin.
The Avari woman blinked, then laughed. A warm, unexpectedly easy sound.
"Why not?" She patted the edge of the wagon bed. "Climb up. I'll give you a ride."
The boy's face lit up. He scrambled aboard at once, all elbows and laughter, settling himself under the canvas as though he'd been granted a throne.
Nearby, a cluster of Nandor hunters stood at a respectful distance from a picketed horse, studying the creature with a mixture of fascination and wariness. The horse, for its part, seemed entirely unconcerned, lazily chewing at a tuft of grass.
"It lets them ride on its back," one hunter said, shaking his head slowly. "I watched them. They sit on the beast and it carries them wherever they wish."
"Impossible," another scoffed.
"I saw it with my own eyes. A woman galloped past our patrol this morning, fast as the wind. The beast obeyed her like it understood her thoughts…"
Lenwë moved deeper into the camp, Denethor at his side.
They passed a training circle where young Avari, barely more than children, practiced with wooden swords under the watchful eye of an instructor. The movements were precise, rehearsed, nothing like the fluid improvisation Nandor hunters used.
"Again," the instructor called. "Your shield is drifting. An orc won't wait for you to correct it."
Lenwë watched it all with a growing sense of vertigo.
These were his kin. His blood, distantly. The same Nelyar who had lived beside his people at Cuiviénen, before the Sundering. But somewhere between that first home and this moment, they had become something he didn't recognize.
Something harder.
He looked at Denethor. His son's expression mirrored his own disquiet, but beneath it Lenwë could see something else. Fascination. Hunger, almost.
"Come," Lenwë said quietly. "Let's not keep them waiting any longer."
He straightened his shoulders, smoothed his robes, and walked forward to meet these strange kin who had somehow turned abandonment into triumph.

{ image: Lenwë, Chieftain of the Nandor }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 8.1]