Chapter Text
North then, next. They attempted briefly to find Gandalf once more, when they returned to Buenos Aires, but the woman was gone, seemingly vanished into the spreading maw of the city as quickly has she had come – they were not overly concerned. She had given them a list of places to see, tips, contacts that would help them, that meant that seeing her again was not entirely necessary. In many ways, Bard was almost glad of it. This was their adventure, their story.
He did not want it to belong to anyone else.
Another airship then, to Venezuela this time, following the breadcrumbs spread out before them. Gandalf had left them two more hits worth pursuing in the Americas before they would be forced to turn their eyes across the Pacific, and Bard was determined to reach the both of them as quickly as possible, despite just how difficult they both were to actually access. Another airship, after that, to Canaima, by which point there were dark circles under Bard’s eyes that neither of them were willing to talk about, sleepless nights in airship hangers and cheap hotels catching up with him in a way that it never would with Thranduil.
His hand still twitched, from time to time.
He saw Bard looking once, and tried to smile about it.
“Just residual static charge,” he whispered, reaching for Bard with his still-living fingers. But Bard hadn’t wanted to be touched, not then, for the knowledge that Thranduil had ripped a part of himself out for nothing still weighed too heavily on his mind, still made his guilt throb in his temples, but he knew that it wasn’t just for his benefit, so it did not pull away.
A boat ride, after that. They did not say anything much to each other, for there was rather too much to say, and neither seemed to know where quite to begin, though often Bard caught Thranduil watching him, quite closely. It was easier to avoid each other once they had disembarked the boat, and began walking through the root-tangled path that led through the jungle to their destination. They walked single file, the birds a cacophony in the trees around them, and Bard wondered whether they were truly living things or remnants of clockwork, for never before had he heard so many calling at once, not when the air was normally so thick with pollution that fewer and fewer animals were being born every year.
The guide, pausing to look back at them, seemed to notice his confusion, and shot him a grin.
“So many birds, it is strange, isn’t it?” he asked, as Bard nodded.
“It is the waterfall,” he continued. “And the… well, you’ll see them, soon enough. But the air is cleaner here, much cleaner than anywhere else on earth, apart from those remote regions where man never reached. Life thrives, here.”
Bard remembered the cities he had seen, some close and some further, all of them thick with pollution, with oil. How long would life thrive?
For that he had no answer.
He never did.
But the hopelessness that was building in his chest seemed to dissipate with alarming speed when they finally caught sight of what they had come here to see: Kerepakupai Meru stretched before them, above them, its throbbing rapids a cacophonous roar drowning out anything that Bard might have normally said to Thranduil in moments like this, when faced with so astounding a sight. Thranduil’s eyes were wide too: for all that he had seen so much time go by, Bard realised that he must never have seen a feat of nature such as this, a waterfall that stretched almost a thousand metres in height.
Or, perhaps, not just a feat of nature.
The guide had stopped, was pointing out features in the landscape around them, and as Bard tuned back in to what he was saying he flinched, just a little, at a familiar name.
“It was a man named Manwe, with extraordinary gifts – perhaps not a man at all, some people would say – who came here and built the fans. You cannot see them now, for they are hidden by the height of the rock, but on a clear day they can be seen from far and wide. Those fans – we do not know how they work, even now, for they are difficult to access and hard to understand – but they seem to filter the air, so that in the canyon life lives as it did many centuries ago.”
Another Cogsmith, another clue given to them by Gandalf, and another set of technologies.
“Is it possible to see the fans?” he asked, and the guide shook his head.
“It is a hard route to the top of the mountain,” he replied, smiling a little kindly at Bard. “And the fans are closed off from visitors, and overgrown besides. They are patrolled constantly – no one knows how they work, you see, only that it involves ancient clockwork, so no one knows how to fix them should anything break, either.”
“Sounds familiar,” Bard mumbled under his breath, as the guide gestured them towards a viewing platform.
Despite his disappointment, he could not bring himself to be so angry. Gandalf had warned them that this was an unlikely lead to get them anywhere, and frankly, Bard had been skeptical about even wasting their time coming here – it had only been at Thranduil’s insistence that they had made the trek. He hadn’t really understood it at first, particularly given Thranduil’s lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of their quest throughout, but he thought now that perhaps he did.
It was in Thranduil’s eyes, in the slight smile around his mouth, in the tilt of his head as he stared up at the waterfall.
He had wanted to come to see it – it had nothing to do with his heart.
“It’s incredible,” he mumbled, moving to Thranduil’s side, pressing closer. He felt that perhaps their normal closeness had been interrupted since Antarctica, and it was only now that he wanted to fix that.
“And one day even this, as great and as fair as it is, will crumble to the ground, and be nothing more than the rubble and plains of something that was once majestic,” Thranduil replied.
Thranduil’s voice was soft: his hand was on the railing of the viewing platform, only his still-living fingers bending around the bar to hold it. Bard forced himself not to look away, but to study that hand, until the sight of it did not frighten him with its implication anymore.
“Don’t be so negative,” Bard whispered, in the end. He didn’t think that Thranduil was really talking about the waterfall, but he wasn’t entirely sure how he should address that.
“I’m not,” Thranduil answered, after a time, and when Bard looked up at his face, he saw that he was smiling. “It is the truth. And the movement of time is a beautiful thing.”
And all that hope and loss and fear and joy that had made up Thranduil’s life, all of it, the parts that Bard knew and the parts that he did not, were in his voice, and for just a moment, Bard thought that he might have understood how Thranduil could be so calm about the prospect of dying, how change after so long could seem so different to him than it did to Bard. Thranduil might have said more, but Bard was giving him that look, that one that meant you are the beautiful thing, you know, and he turned away, hiding a smile in his sleeve.
Things were better, after that. Still not as they had always been, but close enough to it for them to ignore the strain around Bard’s eyes, the stillness in Thranduil’s fingers. The air around their next journeies even further north changed drastically as they travelled onwards, temperatures dropping by the hour: it was something of a shock to the system when they finally left their last airship’s warmth to the bitterness of a cold day in Canada.
Applications to visit the bio-domes of Haida Gwaii normally took some years to be processed as only a few were allowed within the ancient and sacred glass were allowed each month, but Gandalf had apparently known someone on the Haida council (Bard didn’t ask), so they found themselves rubber stamped and crossing the Hecate Strait to the islands without any delay. They were magnificent from a distance, even more so close up: the glass (if indeed it was glass, for Bard couldn't be certain) were entire domed sheets, far more seamless and smooth than that of War City. These were domes made, quite distinctly, by hands that were not the fumbling ones of humans. The two main islands of the collection were encased in a number of domes connected to each other directly: the hundreds of smaller islands dotted around the coast each were contained within their own, access to them only through small portals connected to tiny piers. Many of them were off limits entirely to outsiders, the indigenous inhabitants of the islands unwilling to let any who might pose a danger into their lands.
Bard couldn’t blame them, for that.
They were met by a guide at the main dock, who eyed them with some clear discomfort, her eyes lingering for longer than necessary on Thranduil, as if she could sense something about him that was not quite right. A great bee was carved into welcome sign, and Bard stared at it for some time before the guide noticed, and nodded towards it.
“The symbol of Yavanna,” she muttered.
It wasn’t a name that he had been familiar with before Gandalf had mentioned it, some weeks ago, when showing them a small piece of petrified wood lacking the rings that normally indicated lengthy growth, as if, in fact, it had sprung immediately from the ground, fully formed. He had found it on the beaches of Haida Gwaii, and he had talked with Thranduil about it had some length, but he said very little about Yavanna herself - Bard still knew very little about her – just one more name from a list of figures that remained essential strangers to him.
So he caught up with the guide, who eyed him with some surprise as he offered the warmest smile that he could summon unprovoked.
“Tell me about Yavanna?” he asked, and for a long moment she stared at him, before something softened in her eyes, and she shrugged.
“She walked among us, preserved our lands for our own, protected us from a world bent only on domination, on conquest. It is said that she saw the value in life grown from land made of the bones of ancestors: as plants grow best on top of the plants that came before them, so too does man grow better when they grow where all their kin that came before them were.”
Bard nodded, smiling just a little.
“She was a Cogsmith, wasn’t she?” he asked, and the look she turned on him was appraising.
"That is the name given to them in the west, yes," she said, in the end. "We had a different name for them, for her, but in essence, yes, I suppose. Cogsmiths. The great creators. The curators of nature. Those who walked among us unseen, leaving tracks that memory has allowed to fade into dust."
"What did she do here?"
"She walked along our shores and saw the beauty that was, the beauty of what could be, and all that could be lost, too. She regrew the trees lost to storms, taller and grander before, and whilst she was among our people the flora grew more varied, the creatures that lived here did, too. She cared for the living, more than anything else, that is what they said - and when she saw what was happening elsewhere, how sacred lands were being consumed, she rose the sand and salt from the ocean to form the domes over us, protecting us, saving us. Everything grows here, still, and no one has taken our lands from us - they are ours, thanks to her."
The pride in her voice was clear, the awe and affection intermingling in the way that they only can in the voice of those telling stories that they had heard for as long as they could remember. It lifted Bard's spirits somewhat, even as the clouds overhead broke, rain thundering down against the dome overhead.
"What do you do for water, for the plants?" he asked, and she pointed to the narrow channels in the glass that Bard had not noticed before, which fed the rainwater down through intricate internal pipework overhead.
The guide lead them through to the bio-domes that they were allowed to visit, walking a little behind them as they wandered along the pathways, taking turns at random and without much concern for where they might lead. Long stretches of grey-white sand, towering cliffs, soaring trees: all of this and so much more encompassed within the glass of the dome, the sea coursing through some hidden channel to bubble up on the other side of the barrier, still lapping against the sand with the movement of the tides. It was beautiful, there was no way to deny that: a different sort of beauty to South Africa, to Venezuela, perhaps, but undeniable still.
It might have taken Bard's breath away had he not been quite so confused.
"It's amazing," he whispered to Thranduil, out of the corner of his mouth. "Don't get me wrong. But I can't actually see anything mechanical here, can you?"
Thranduil shrugged, oddly non-commital, before glancing behind them at their guide, who was allowing them a little more space. When he seemed certain that she could not overhear them he reached down, to grab a handful of fallen leaves in his one, working hand.
He held them, quite close to his chest, and closed his eyes.
"There is a... like a static charge in them, but not quite," he whispered. "Something like living wire, but different. More complex, in a way. Nothing like me."
A breeze came, from somewhere Bard could not locate, and Thranduil let go of the leaves, which drifted from his fingers slowly, sofly, returning to the ground.
They walked on, in silence for a while longer.
"Are you sorry we came?" Bard asked, in the end, and Thranduil shook his head immediately.
"Not at all. We have found no answers here, but I am glad that I got to see this place. There is a wonder here that cannot quite be explained, a feeling in the air... it makes me feel more alive than I have done for the longest time."
"Besides," he continued, when Bard said nothing in reply. "It is a place I got to see with you, a memory to be shared, something that belongs to just you and I, and that is a precious thing indeed."
Bard could feel a blush start to build behind his ears at that.
“It makes you wonder why they left, when they were able to create such beauty,” was all that he could find to say, staring around himself, but when he caught sight of Thranduil in his peripheral vision he realised that the man was shaking his head.
“This beauty was here before – Yavanna, and the rest of them, they preserved it, and replicated it, but they did not create it.” There was a small smile curving at Thranduil’s mouth, a gentle thing. “And we will never know why they left – but I suspect that many of them did not, not by choice.”
Bard frowned, then. “What do you mean?"
“We heard the story of Tulkas, Bard.”
A sick sort of dread then, building around his chest. How many of them had died in pursuit of fixing their own mistakes? How many of them had been lost before their time?
“You think-”
Thranduil shrugged.
“Perhaps.”
Bard swallowed, painfully.
“That’s terrible.”
But Thranduil's eyes were soft as they turned to Bard, full of feelings that neither of them could articulate.
“Is it?" he asked, in the end. "Death must come to all things, in the end, and I think that if I were to die, I would want to do so in pursuit of something that I believed in.”
Crossing the Pacific was no easy task. Storms wracked the sea, and from their position in Canada the weather was predicted to be even worse, so flying was interspaced with frequent stops across Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, along the Eastern Russian coastline before they finally reached China and the delta of the Yellow River. The cramped cabin and recycled air were bad enough: the constant delays and inability to do anything other than pad around a constant litany of air-terminals that all looked exactly the damn same all made Bard all the more impatient to join the boat at the mouth of the river.
It was a great sense of relief when they finally did: they spent the first couple of nights on board sleeping out on the deck rather than in their cabin, just for the novelty of fresh air, wrapped up in blankets, uncomfortable but feeling oddly liberated. The other passengers thought them strange, it was clear, but neither of them could bring themselves to really care.
The journey up the river took several days, and Bard and Thranduil spoke little to the other passengers. It was the longest time they had spent around people in such a small place in a long time – they had kept to their cabins in the airships – and now Bard found it strange to be around them. Everything about this quest made him feel oddly separate from them, disparate, the knowledge that he was searching for something that none of them would ever understand leaving him feeling adrift from the rest of humanity, clinging to the raft that was Thranduil, the only thing keeping afloat.
Because of this, he had not really been aware of how far they were from their destination, and the announcement that they had reached it, in an inconspicuous but deep stretch of the river, came as something of a surprise.
“There it is,” the captain of the boat called to the passengers. “You see it, gleaming beneath the water? The bones of the last leviathan.”
They had been told the rest of the story in their first few days on the great water-courses since they had boarded at Jinan. Its engines churned up the waters beneath them as the stories were passed from one passenger to the next, evolving and growing and becoming more and more exaggerated the longer that it was discussed.
The leviathans had not been seen in centuries by the time this one came from the sea – they were believed to have died out, if they had ever existed to begin with. Ulmo’s children, that which he had created to guard the waters of this planet – like whales, in build if not quite in size, but whirring with clockwork beneath great sheets of leather stitched together by the hand of something close to a God. Teeth like sharks, made to protect; eyes made from the largest of pearls. This beast had crawled from the ocean up the river one day, nearly a century ago now – no one knew why it had come, only that it had been dying, spewing oil from deep rends in its skin that stained the river strange orange-yellow colours that had never quite faded in places, as if it had sunk into the rocks. It had forced its way up the course of the river, flooding the lands around it as it had dislodged the river water, shaking the river banks so that nearby houses trembled as if an earthquake had struck them.
Eventually, of course, it had died – it had gone as far up the river as it could, until its body had sunk finally beneath the water. Some still wondered why it had come to this place – was it a marker of a great cataclysm, had it been searching for something, was it chased from the water by something far more terrifying than itself? There were no answers. That did not stop people from speculating.
There was not much left of it now. Scavengers had seen to that, just as they had in Antarctica – the mass of precious metal and material had been too much to resist by the authorities, particularly when so many of their own natural resources had been stripped in their desperate struggle for industrial advancement. All that was left now was the great bones of the beast, made of a metal that none could identify, too heavy for even cranes to lift from the water. They had been left there, slowly collecting drifts of silt as the decades rolled past, a tourist attraction now, and little more.
A quick bribe to the captain put them at the front of the queue for the dive into the river: heavy equipment was strapped to their backs, great glass domes placed over their heads, filling Bard’s ears immediately with the sound of ticking coming from somewhere deep within the recesses of its mechanism. The water was cold when they finally were permitted to dive, colder than Bard had expected, and he had sunk, motionless for a moment, in shock, until the flicker of movement at the corner of his eye had brought him back to the moment.
He followed Thranduil down to the riverbed, to the bones in the silt.
They shone, strange and silvery, something like titanium but… not. Bard knew, though he did not know how, that he had never seen a metal like this before, if it even was metal: it had a quality entirely unfamiliar to him, glowing like the living wires had, inhuman, impossible. As they came closer through the silty water they seemed to grow, and it was only when he reached the riverbed he realised just how vast the skeleton was, flinching in his suit as he turned to see an enormous jawbone, its teeth ripped from it, cartilage and bone left jagged by the industrious knives of scavengers.
Dead.
That deep, yawning feeling seemed to grow all the bigger inside him. Once more, something dying, something stolen, something dead. There wasn’t even any of the original mechanisms left of this beast: it had all been stripped away. At one thought he thought he saw something glittering amongst the silt, and for a heart-rending moment he was certain it might be a left-over cog, something unnoticed, but when he looked closer he realised it was just a smooth river stone, catching the sunlight through the water. Everything had been stripped away.
There was nothing here.
It was strange, ghostly, beautiful sight, but there was no part of this that would help Thranduil.
More wasted time, when they seemed to have so little left.
He reached to touch one of those bones, when their half an hour was done and the beeping in their suit indicated that they were due to re-surface.
It felt warm, beneath the thick leather of his suit, but he wasn’t sure if that was his imagination or not.
Bard was trying desperately not to feel disappointed by the time they had dried off and returned to the deck of the boat, was struggling not to feel the weight of another failure straddling around his shoulders. Another ocean crossed, another continent breached, and still no answers had been found.
“What else do we know about Ulmo?” Bard whispered, trying to distract himself, the two of them leaning against the railing of the ship, craning over, staring at the dim shape beneath them as the rest of the passengers took their turns diving among the ribcages of something which had once lived, something that had once been miraculous.
Thranduil shrugged, the movement graceful, betraying the fact that he probably did not know all that much – just the fragments of tales spoken to him by family whose faces he might well have forgotten after this much time.
“They say he made filters, deep in the depths of the ocean, to cleanse it from all that mankind has poured into it.”
Bard nodded, slowly.
“Like Manwe, with the air?”
Thranduil pulled his lip between his teeth, worrying at it in an oddly human gesture as he seemed to think on that.
“So they say, though no one has ever seen them – there is much of the ocean that we have never seen. It seems as much as many of them wished to create, others were more concerned with trying to save what had already been there. Ulmo showed man how to bend metal to make boats, how to construct the breathing apparatus that allows mankind to skim just underneath the surface – but he was a being of a different make, who could survive the deep pressure. Not of flesh and blood, like man.”
“So we will never get to go deep enough to see what he created?”
“Who knows?” Thranduil replied, with a small smile. “Man has already created so many wonders.”
Bard shook his head.
“But we have destroyed so much, too. So much has been ruined already.”
Thranduil’s hand was warm in his.
“All things must come to an end.”
That ache was back, the deep and consuming thing, and he tried to find Thranduil’s eyes with his own, those beautiful eyes, searching for comfort – but Thranduil’s gaze was fixed on the water, on the glimmering metal of the skeleton of the great leviathan deep beneath the water.
“You won’t,” Bard said, eventually, and then Thranduil finally did look at him, and there was pain there, something left unsaid, something that Bard was not willing to listen to, something that he still did not think that he was willing to hear.
“Perhaps I should,” he began. “Bard-”
But he shook his head, and dropped Thranduil’s hand.
“I can’t talk about this.”
He didn’t know if Thranduil really understood, but he did not try to carry on the conversation.
They didn’t say anything more about it at any point that day, nor the next, when they left the river at Lanzhou to headed straight once more to the air terminals, in order to connect their next flight (and God, Bard had had had enough of this). They didn’t say anything as they waited in the foyer, nor as they boarded another airship (and Gods, but was Bard growing sick of airships, of the throbbing engines and packaged food and cramped cabins).
Bard wasn’t sure if they were ever going to talk about it, and he was pretty sure that was his fault.
They fell asleep in silence that night, and though they started out separate in the bed, it wasn’t long before they found each other in their sleep, wrapping familiar bodies around each other, seeking comfort even when they were not awake. When Bard woke late the next day, it was to the sound of the pilot announcing their arrival in Shanghai airspace, with Thranduil’s hair pressed against his face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, though he wasn’t sure if Thranduil was awake enough to hear him. "I'm sorry that we have found nothing, and I am sorry that I can't be okay with that."
Shanghai was visible from their portholes now, and what a sight it was – Bard had heard the stories, of course, but it was only as he saw the city that he realised just what truth had been within them. Shanghai had been one of the great industrial forerunners of the world, one of the greatest cities to ever have been, to ever be. More populace than any other, stronger, greater: a city of innovation and craft, of steel and iron and all things that made man brutal, and strong.
“What phenomenal things has man created in their infant mortality,” Thranduil whispered, fixed on the sprawling mass of steel and fog beneath them, a city stretching out far further than Bard had ever seen before – a thing of dirt, yes, but a glorious thing, none the less. Bard couldn’t help but wonder – perhaps mankind was made for filth, but did that have to mean that what they made could not be beautiful, too, just in a different way?
They were not made of living wire and impossible metal. They were flesh, and blood, and bone – rotting, changing, ending, but magnificent in its own, short way.
Perhaps he needed to see these things through Thranduil’s eyes.
The largest city left in the world – and certainly still the largest and most successful industrial one – certainly had much to suggest itself in terms of the development of mechanisms. But when they disembarked the airship, Thranduil did not lead them to any factory, nor to the union houses of any craftsmen – in fact, he did not seem to be heading anywhere. For hours they simply walked, through streets that seemed to constantly change: from cramped alleyways lined with workers houses to grand roads made impressive by the tall and graceful buildings on either side, to winding and beautiful streets leading to temples, to high-end restaurants and shops. It was a strange place, to a man who had lived most of his life in the muck of a city in which nothing was ever clean, or beautiful.
For all its glory, Bard was still uncertain what they were looking for. He had been surprised when Thranduil had suggested stopping in Shanghai – it had not come up at any point before in their journey – but he had been willing, willing to indulge anything that Thranduil might ask at this point, unable to forget just how much more Thranduil knew, even if his knowledge was a fragmentary one. Their wanderings did not seem to elicit any answer to this uncertainty, and in the end, he could hold in his curiosity no longer.
“Why did we come here?” Bard asked, in the end, as they took a seat across from each other at the outside table of a bar. Thranduil was smiling, his eyes on nothing, as if he was enjoying a private joke of his own. Bard nudged his knee with his own, shooting him and inquiring look, and he was surprised when Thranduil leaned close, speaking low.
“Aulë created his own peoples, you know,” he said, and Bard blinked.
“Like you?” he asked, and Thranduil made a gesture close to a shrug, not quite a yes or a no.
“In a sense, but not quite. I was never told much about Aule – he didn’t have all that much to do with us, apparently, though he was a great craftsman, perhaps in many ways the most skilled of all of them, for he was the only one apart from Yavanna able to create anything near the complexity of the clockwork men, the two of them the only ones that ever came close to rivalling Eru’s own work. He made his own mechanical race, built for creation, not for war as we were: and he too helped man enter their vast clockwork age, handed to them the greatest of innovations, though it is said that he regretted it later, when man began to build over the underground cities of his own creations, when they began to hunt them, when his creations had to hide from mortals.”
Bard chewed on his lip for a moment. “Do they still walk this earth?”
Thranduil’s eyes were back on the busy street in front of them, but Bard was not expecting the answer that he gave after a long pause.
“They are watching us right now.”
Bard had to try very hard not to flinch, to stop himself from spinning around and staring at everyone behind him, and Thranduil shot him a little smile, before nodding just slightly in the direction of a narrow street. Bard glanced over, as casually as he could: people moved in and out at a rapid space, but there, leaning against the wall, was a small man, not facing them and smoking, for all the world uninterested in them and everything going on around him. But then, just quickly, Bard caught him glancing over at them, a quick and fleeting thing, before he took another long drag of his cigarette.
“Not very subtle,” Bard remarked, and Thranduil hid a smile in his sleeve.
“If they wanted to stay hidden, we would never know. They want us to see that they are watching.”
Bard nodded, though he was not entirely sure that he understood.
“In what way are they different?” he asked in the end, confident that Thranduil would not say anything more about why they were there when they were still watching them. Thranduil shrugged, just a little.
“They do not live eternal, like I, though their lives are greatly extended. They live for a spell, then they retire to the stone, as they say, and stop their clockwork, only to restart it again after years of rest. I do not know much more than that: they are a secretive race.”
Bard caught the sight of movement out of the corner of his eye.
“He’s leaving – should we follow him?”
Thranduil shook his head.
“No,” he said, quietly. “They will come to us when they are ready.”
And he was right, as he so often was: later that night, after wandering for a time, they had come across a small restaurant, almost empty, and they had taken a table in the corner, ordering in halting and unsure words. Thranduil said little, facing the door, but his eyes were focused on the street outside, and after about half an hour, when their plates had been cleared away and Bard was beginning to wonder about moving on, Thranduil sat suddenly straighter, his face hardening.
Bard did not turn around: he did not need to. A small, stocky man was already pulling a chair to their table, his fiery red hair streaked with grey, his strong hands littered with scars. He folded his arms across his chest, glaring at Thranduil.
“It has been many years since last one of your kind was seen in this part of the world,” he said, his voice low and authoritative, and not entirely friendly.
Thranduil inclined his head, just a little.
“And many years since any word was heard of yours.”
They stared at each other, for a long and hard moment, and Bard wondered briefly if the whole thing was going to end up in a fight, but quite suddenly the two of them slumped back in their chairs, almost in unison.
“Aye,” replied the newcomer. “Secrets are kept for a reason. What are you doing here?”
Thranduil raised a pointed eyebrow.
“To the point, I see,” he answered. “It does not concern you.”
Bard was not entirely sure why Thranduil was suddenly being so cagey, nor why he was pushing away the first tangible evidence of the Cogsmiths that they could actually speak to. He put his hand on Thranduil’s leg under the table, in an attempt to offer calm and comfort should he need it, and leant closer over the table.
“We’re searching for something.”
The red-haired stranger stared at him, bemused, and when he replied it was to Thranduil, not to Bard.
“It seems odd to me that the human is a part of this,” he said, his own eyebrow quirking. “Secrets only remain secrets as long as they are kept, friend. Though I suspect that you would not be the first to break your silence.”
Thranduil did not reply to that; the man shook his head, and sighed.
“We have never been friends, your people and mine, but we are few in number now, and you are even fewer, if there are even any of you left whatsoever – and I have no proof of that. No matter what might have gone on between our peoples in the past, we share a common frailty, and should you need our help, I will see what can be done.”
Thranduil seemed startled at this: his leg was tense against Bard’s hand as he leant closer over the table.
“You have a reputation of reticence,” he said, his voice slightly less harsh than before. “I will admit surprise.”
The man quirked a small smile.
“Extinction creeps ever closer every century,” he said, and his voice was light but laced with a perceptible grief. “Less and less of my kin arise from stone at each awakening. If ever there was a time to let go of the past, it is now.”
They stared at each other, silent, and then the man reached across, his thick fingers skimming the back of Thranduil’s hand, surprisingly gentle, before he turned Thranduil’s hand over and pressed just one finger to the centre of his palm. Bard expected Thranduil to pull away, but he did not: to Bard’s surprise, his eyes flickered closed, and he seemed to shrink in on himself at the touch, which did not waver.
“And you are dying,” the man said. “I can hear the slowing of your clockwork from here, and now I can feel it too. You can feel mine, the movement of my clockwork, quicker than yours – we think that’s why it doesn’t last as long, you know. But the same, at the end of the day, in many ways – we turn to different cogs, we answer to different songs, but deep down, we are not all that different. Just dying, frightened members of races passed out of mortal memory, trying desperately to cling on to something.”
“It has been centuries since last I felt the ticking of any heart other than my own,” Thranduil whispered, his voice strange – not quite joy and not quite grief, but some painful and complicated combination of the two of them.
“You have been alone,” the man said. “For so very long.”
But then Thranduil opened his eyes, and shook his head, and his free hand found Bard’s underneath the table.
“Not quite alone,” he replied, and the man smiled, wild and wide and genuine.
“Aye,” he answered. “Not quite alone.”
The three of them stared at each other for a long moment, connected in a line of touch, and then the man nodded, as if finally making his mind up about something.
“My name is Dain,” he told them. “Dain Ironfoot – I lost a leg, some years passed, and we didn’t have the right metal to replace it, so they had to do it with iron. I’m the last in a long line of rulers of my people, and we here are all that are left, now.”
“I am Bard,” he found himself answering. “I’m mortal, and not a part of any great line at all. And right now we’re trying to find the Cogsmiths. Any trace of them, at all, or any way to repair him. Do you-”
Dain shook his head, his mouth twitching with a half-smile, but his eyes sad.
“We were made differently, my kind and his,” he told him, anticipating Bard’s question. “And our skill is waning. Perhaps once, some centuries back… but now we do not know how to fix a heart such as his – and I am sorry for that.”
Thranduil did not look surprised, but he did look interested.
“You sound as if you have tried.”
“I…” Dain looked away, for a moment. “It was many, many years ago now. One of my cousin’s sons. He hadn’t even taken his first stone-sleep when he was taken from us, too young. But he had loved one such as you, and she followed him. We tried, when her own clockwork faltered after his death, but…”
“I’m sorry,” Thranduil said, his voice grave.
“So am I,” Dain said, sincerely. “She was brave, until the end.”
Bard sat back in his chair, disappointed despite himself.
“So you cannot help us,” he said, and Dain pursed his lips, his eyes bright and shrewd.
“Not with that,” he said. “And it grieves me greatly that we cannot, I mean that with all honesty. But perhaps, in some other way. We have been gathering our own clues, you know. Perhaps it is time to work together.”
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Thranduil answered, with a reticent amusement.
Dain nodded, smiling too.
“All things change, my friend. Surely you’ve realised that by now.”