Eventually Maedhros finished the bowl, and as the broth settled like a fortifying, invigorating weight into his stomach, softly he murmured, “Water… p-please…” The clamour of battle dwindled to the mournful keens of the dying, but in his fear Maedhros scarcely heard them. Before three monstrous Valaraukar he was dragged, and four burly uruks held him fast as their flame-filled eyes appraised him. A dissenting grumble rolled through the orcs, but slowly they shuffled off, and relief poured through Maedhros’ heart as he heard them depart. Yet setting towards him then he heard the heavy tread of the captain; unseen things crunched to the stones by his side, and swiftly he steeled himself, he drew to himself whatever shreds of lordliness he had left and thrust them out before him like a shield. Wait!” Maedhros croaked; the words sounded pathetic even in his own ears but still he spoke them to keep that awful gag from his lips. “Wait… you… You’re taking me to him, aren’t you? To… to the Moringotto, to Angband…”

Yet even as that resolution turned in his mind, unbidden anger churned in his blood, and hard he gripped into the edge of the table to still the shake in his fingers. The Oath, that accursed oath sworn in fey mood and wrathful flames pounded in his veins and it renounced all clemency, it thirsted for blood, it crooned for war, but Maedhros would not so easily succumb to its seduction. Strength in arms might not avail his kin in reclaiming the Silmarils; their armies reeled in the wake of his father’s death, they mourned their kindred slain in the battle under the silent stars and wished no more for conflict, and Maedhros would not see the blood of his people further spilled upon capricious whim. The Oath renewed at his father’s deathbed might gnaw at him, and his brothers also; it would cozen patience to careless haste, it would twist sense to base impulse, but he would not fall prey to its demands.Y’hear that, snaga,” a deep voice growled, and an iron-shod boot clipped into the side of Maedhros’ thigh an instant later. “My boys should ‘ave their fun with you. Such troubles we took with you, you might give us a little pleasure in return…” In his book he writes. "It is memory that ages us not time." The mind forgets nothing, he says. "I may forget things, but the mind doesn't." In captivity he found himself remembering details from his childhood, things that he didn't even know he knew. "I could smell the linoleum in the house I grew up in. I could feel, twirl in my hand, the earrings that my mother wore when I was a child and she'd carry me in her arms." So he knows, however much he says, what happened in Beirut is the past. "It's like a book I can take down from a shelf and read it and replace." Celegorm’s words turned in his mind, but Maedhros would not allow them to daunt him. For as the ranks of his retinue formed up behind him, as Gaelor loosed his banner and Orellë sounded a triumphant horn to the skies above, as the drum of galloping hooves filled his ears, grim, unyielding resolve settled in Maedhros’ stomach, and it would not be undone. Keenan's parents are both dead – his father's death was pivotal in his decision to go to Beirut. It was as he carried his father's coffin that he made the decision to leave Belfast, and to seek a new life overseas as a teacher at the American University in Beirut. At the time of the kidnap he was wearing one of his father's shirts, and that connection was a crumb of comfort to him – in An Evil Cradling, he writes movingly about how his dad became "not simply a memory but … a real presence … a presence I could feel more than see, a comforting reassurance that eased the hurt into a deeply filled sadness, yet that same sadness as it became reflective, lifted me". His mother died in 2004 having survived his captivity – something she rarely spoke about, Keenan says. "It was her way," he explains. "When I came home she didn't ask, and I didn't tell much at all. My sisters told me that when I was away she didn't speak much about what was happening. When there were rumours that I might be coming home, though, she knitted me a sweater." The Balrog captain’s bellow seemed to reverberate through the very earth, and dread spilled through Maedhros’ innards.

Within the stirrups he rose, he touched his spurs once more to his horse’s flanks and gave the beast its head, and he let the tender night wash over him as they sped away across the plains. This is nothing more than a feint,” Celegorm had whispered, he had implored Maglor to see reason even as the final preparations for Maedhros’ leave-taking were made. “This is a game of daggers and mirrors, and we cannot fathom what shadows lurk behind this façade. Nelyo will not see sense, he will not see the snare that loops before him; he will throw himself away upon the rash hope that a thief might relinquish that which he has stolen. This is madness, Káno, this is folly, and you must make him see it.” Stubbornly - it is stubbornness that he considers his principal trait - he has resisted having an identity foisted on him. And this has served him well. But intransigence, as he points out, can carry its own terrible consequences. "If I believe something, I believe it passionately and no one will change it. It's awful. I am old enough to know better, old enough to rationalise things. But, with me, belief has to be a hundred per cent." So he can understand, he says, what happened in Beirut. "The ramifications of that sort of belief. Why they took hostages. How they came to murder six people. I don't approve. But I can understand it." Maedhros’ head lolled down onto his chest as exhaustion stole through him, the tightness of the gag tore at his lips and sent waves of such horrible pressure throbbing through his head. Despair clawed at his heart as for what felt like the thousandth time he squirmed within his bonds, he near ripped his wrists bloody in his attempts to free them, but such efforts were made in vain. To your posts, now!” the captain thundered; a blast of heat shimmered through the air as it roared: “Else I will have you flayed for insubordination, you and your miserable company alike!”No!” he screamed, though pain raced through him panic lent strength to his movements, and near blind with fear he tore against the orcs that held him. “No,” he spat; he grunted and shook as a savage jerk upon his hair pulled him up short, and those hateful fingers only grasped him the tighter. “No, no, let me go! Let me go!” And so it began. His re-emergence into a world he thought he knew, the world he had left behind, but different now. Not so much because the world had changed, or even because he himself had changed. But because his place in the world had changed. He went into the cell Brian Keenan, an unknown university teacher from Belfast. He then became Brian Keenan, the disappeared. All that effort for this miserable pig?” A sneering voice whined before him, and Maedhros started as amid the slurred intonations of misshapen lips, he recognised the corrupt, basal form of archaic Quenya, and the orc’s crude words seared through him. “Nar, should’ve gutted him in the hollow, left him red and gasping with the rest of them.” Fury swelled in Maedhros’ heart as he saw their lines break into a sprint, the outrage of betrayal squalled in his veins but tightly he gripped to it, he mastered it, and as Fëanor’s son revealed in the fey glory of his wrath he drew his sword, and aloud he cried: “Hold fast! Ortaerë, mehtarnya! Ortaerë!”

His mother, a housewife, used to say to him: "Politics stops at your doorstep.""But I never knew if she meant coming in or going out." His father was a telephone engineer and before that he worked on the buses. A sweet man. "I remember him bringing home all these injured animals he'd find on the road and mum telling him to get them out." Furiously he fought; they would not take him, they would not take him, the thought screeched through his head as his boots skidded through a mire of blood, but as a fiery whip suddenly cut towards his head, in that terrible instant he came undone. We march east,” a deep voice bellowed, and Maedhros flinched in horror as he felt himself passed between the company of uruks, they pushed him about as if he was nothing more than a rag doll until a fresh set of hands grasped him firmly, and miserably he stilled within them. “Collect what treasures you may from the field, but the elf’s sword and banner I claim in tribute to our lord. Make haste, we march with the shadows!” Why, Captain?” the deep voice called, and a chorus of snarls accompanied it. “He is a slave, for so we’ve captured him. We cannot take our sport with him?” Keenan is an odd mixture of the literal and the intensely poetic - both these helped to preserve him in prison. He used his willpower and his practical intelligence to make what sense he could of what was happening to him - he could kid himself for only a few days that they'd let him out as soon as they found he was an Irishman. And, as he has said, he used his imagination to escape into himself. Alone, for five months, he invented or rather elaborated a character, Turlough O'Carolan, Ireland's national musician, a 17th-century itinerant blind harpist, who became his companion. A strange choice, you might think, when he could have imagined some sexy seductress. But, as he knew, or was beginning to know, survival depended somehow on suspending desire, not promoting it. Men in prison, he says, think of sex far less than you'd believe. "That's an invention from movies. The men I knew in captivity didn't talk about sex much at all." They couldn't bear to.Well, I really hope you've enjoyed what you've read so far! I though a nice little battle-scene and its aftermath to get everyone warmed up... But genuinely I hope you liked it, and I hope everyone would like to read on, as I'm really excited about continuing this fic (assuming everyone doesn't suddenly turn around and go 'euuuugh no'!) Questions, comments or concerns are always welcome, either here or at the heart of my lair: markedasinfernal.tumblr.com Not to myself. To myself I never disappeared, I knew exactly where I was." Crucial, this. All the time that the world knew nothing of his existence, he hadn't ceased to exist, though he had transposed worlds. His reality, confined though it was, was his own. He didn't look outside. "My recollection is that if you focus on the real world, which isn't your real world, because your world is here in your head, then you are going to make life very difficult." But inevitably there are reminders, some of them funny. "We were in a taxi together in London, and the driver kept looking at us in his mirror," says Keenan. "And then he came through on his intercom and he said: 'Sorry to interrupt you gentlemen, but I couldn't help asking … wouldn't you be more comfortable travelling in the boot?'"