The Light Between Our Scars | Adar x Galadriel | Rings of Power

Chapter 3: Under the Moonlight

Galadriel tried to syncronize her breath with the rhythmic gallop of the horse. The animal was sweating profusely, and white foamy saliva came from his mouth. Her heart tightened, sensing the pain of that wonderful creature, but they still weren't out of danger; the woods were swarming with orcs, and it was imperative for them to get away as far as possible. Her arms hurt from her efforts in preventing Adar from falling off the horse. His back was leaning on her chest, and she felt his blood soaking her clothes. Belanor held the reins, and Galadriel couldn't help but notice that he was not an expert rider. They even risked crashing against a tree a couple of times, but fortunately the horse seemed to know what he was doing. She wondered if Belanor was really a soldier, and if not, why he was disguised as one.

"I think we can stop now!" he exclaimed after what seemed an eternity. The horse slowed down, huffing and breathing heavily until it stopped near a big granite boulder. Galadriel looked around; the shadows of the sunset had now turned to darkness, but the half moon shone enough to allow her to see that the trees were starting to thin out, and she could hear the slow and inviting gurgling of a nearby stream.

"Yes, here is good" she nodded. They dismounted and took Adar near the boulder. She urged Belanor to give her his mantle and to take some water from the stream. He rushed to the horse to get something to carry the water with and went in the direction of the creek.

Galadriel tore the mantle into strips and started to cut Adar's armor with a knife. When she finally freed his chest from all the layers of armor and fabric, she couldn't hide an exclamation. In the light of the moon, the abdomen of the Uruk looked horrible. Aside from the fresh wounds, she noted with horror that the flesh was full of old scars, far worse than the ones visible on his face. One of them ran from the neck to the lower abdomen, as though he had been opened in two. Just standing or walking was probably incredibly painful for him, and he had been dealing with this for millennia. Wounds that endure an age... He had returned Nenya - the only thing that could heal him from all that pain - without hesitation, just for the peace of Middle-Earth. She swallowed painfully.

Belanor came back from the stream, carrying a saddlebag full of water. "It was the only thing I could find to bring you the water" he gasped. "Thank you, Belanor. It's enough. Now please help me clean his wounds and bind them. We have to stop the bleeding" Galadriel started to dip a strip in the water. It was really difficult for them to clean his body with the bare moonlight, but they couldn't light a fire because they didn't know how far from the orcs they actually were. And they didn't even have something to light a fire with. Their condition was pitiful, Galadriel had to admit. She looked at Nenya and thought how useful it would be for them if she could control her light, but the ring was inanimate.

"How is he still alive?" Belanor asked while carefully cleaning the nearest laceration with a grimace of disgust on his face. "Uruks are stronger than us. He suffered a lot to become one" she pointed at the old scars. He frowned. After some minutes of silence, he asked "Why?". "What?" Galadriel raised her eyes, giving a quick look at him, then returned to her work. "Why did he want to become an Uruk?". "I'm not sure, Belanor. He had been tortured, physically and internally. He certainly is a very tormented creature" she responded distractedly.

She was actually thinking about Nenya and how it had healed him briefly. She struggled to decide what the right thing to do was now. Should she use it to heal the Uruk again? The wounds were profound, and she couldn't see how he would ever be able to survive; but still, she felt uncomfortable using an Elven ring to heal one of the gravest enemies of the Elves in front of Belanor. She owed a debt of gratitude to Adar, but this didn't mean she could claim the right to use the ring for her own personal purposes. She had made enough mistakes in the past, following her own intuitions alone. The memory of Halbrand painfully entered her thoughts, but she quickly pushed it away. No, she wouldn't make a decision for now; she could stop the bleeding in some other way and try to give his body some strength.

She remembered a bush of Aïthenintil she had glimpsed near the stream when they dismounted from the horse. "Hurry, Belanor, I need you to gather those herbs near the water" Galadriel ordered. When she had the herbs, she dipped them into the water to make a compress and delicately applied them to the wounds. "It would work better with warm water" she said "but it should avoid infections and stop the bleeding". Then they quickly bound all the Uruk's abdomen with the remaining strips, tying them very tightly; it looked like the bleeding had finally stopped.

Galadriel put a hand over Adar's heart and the other hand on his forehead. The Uruk gave a small gasp, then his breath seemed to adjust to a more normal rhythm, and his muscles started to relax. Finally, she soaked the last strip in clean water and tried to hydrate his mouth as much as she could. "I can do no more, for now" she said, standing up and moving her dirty hair out of her face.

She looked at Belanor interrogatively "Who are you really? I don't believe you're a soldier". Belanor blushed in the darkness. "No, Lady Galadriel. I'm not a soldier indeed" he said, standing up in front of her. "I was one of Celebrimbor's apprentices, I'm a blacksmith". Celebrimbor. Galadriel felt a sting of pain in her heart. "And how do you come to wear a soldier's armor?" she asked.

"When the Dwarfs' army arrived, they freed the Elves imprisoned in Eregion by the orcs, including myself. It was chaos, and I had no protection, so I took armour from a dead soldier" He swallowed, painfully remembering those moments "Then Gil-Galad and Elrond planned to set up an Elven camp far from Eregion. I found a lost horse, and I was following the other Elves when I saw a sudden white light in the forest and a female voice in my head saying Come, Come, Come."

"A female voice?" Galadriel was confused "Yes. It was not yours, though. It was peremptory and insistent. I couldn't resist her call. That's how I found you" Belanor concluded.

Galadriel frowned, pacing in little circles. "So, you know where Gil-Galad and Elrond were headed?" "Yes, Lady Galadriel. I can bring you there tomorrow, when I understand better where we are". "Good. At least we have a starting point" she looked at Adar lying at her feet and continued "I guess the best thing we can do is rest now. I think we both have forgotten the last time we slept?"

After cleaning their faces the best they could at the stream, they lay down near the boulder, with Adar between them. Belanor fell asleep immediately, while Galadriel still had too much adrenaline in her body. She stared at the moon and the stars above, then turned her head and looked at Adar. The Uruk was breathing regularly. She wondered why she hadn't noticed how Elven his face looked before. Who was he, before becoming Adar?

She thought again of the Elf he had become while wearing Nenya. His warm, green eyes and sinuous movements. No more flames, and no more darkness. Let this Ring heal the rift between Elf and Uruk... She didn't realize it at the time, but his soft words and gentle appearance struck her more than she would admit. Being so near to Adar in the quiet of the night gave her a strange sense of... Safety? Protection? She wasn't able to give a name to that sensation; she just knew it was very different from the unsafe feeling she experienced with Halbrand. She nervously turned her head to the sky again, frowning. She didn't need protection; she was the Commander of the Northern Armies after all. A deformed and corrupted Elf wasn't going to change that, especially considering how bloodthirsty and ruthless he had been just the day before.

She closed her eyes and, after a minute, slowly moved her hand and gently grabbed Adar's.

It was only then that she could finally fall asleep.