Chapter 6: The Broken Ones
Maeglin found them eight days after the battle.
I was drilling the militia—what remained of it—when his scout appeared at the edge of the training ground. One look at his face told me something had changed.
"How many?"
"Eighteen. Maybe twenty." Maeglin kept his voice low. "Women, mostly. Children. A few old men. They're on the eastern road, maybe three miles out."
"Orcs?"
"Refugees. From the farmsteads beyond the Trollshaws." His jaw tightened. "What's left of them."
I met them at the gate.
Eighteen people. Maeglin had counted correctly. They walked in a ragged column—no carts, no animals, nothing but the clothes on their backs and the haunted look of those who'd lost everything.
A woman led them. Young, maybe twenty, with a baby strapped to her chest and a toddler clutching her hand. Behind her came the rest: grey-haired grandmothers, gaunt children, a one-legged man using a spear as a crutch.
The walking wounded of a war most of Middle-earth didn't know was happening.
"Who leads here?" The young woman's voice was stronger than her appearance suggested.
"I do." I stepped forward, keeping my movements slow. "I'm Aldric. You're safe now."
Safe. The word tasted like ash. But she needed to hear it.
"We have wounded," she said. "Two children with fever. My grandmother—" Her voice cracked. "She hasn't walked on her own for three days."
"Thorwen." I didn't need to raise my voice; my healer was already moving. "Get them inside. Food and water first, then assessments."
The column shuffled through our gates. I watched them pass—eighteen pairs of eyes ranging from blank shock to desperate gratitude. Eighteen new mouths in a settlement already straining.
An old man stopped beside me. His hands shook with age or trauma, I couldn't tell which.
"You're the lord?"
"Something like that."
"Bregol. I was a shepherd, before." He stared at his trembling hands. "Before they came."
"The orcs?"
"Orcs." The word came out like a curse. "Not like any raid I've seen. Not hungry animals looking for easy meat. These were... organized. They had a leader."
The cold I'd felt during Halbarad's briefing returned.
"What kind of leader?"
Bregol's face went grey.
"I only saw it once. In the firelight, when they burned our village." He swallowed hard. "Bigger than the others. Much bigger. And it spoke. Not grunts and snarls—words. It gave orders."
An orc that spoke. An orc that commanded.
I kept my expression neutral, but my mind raced. The books I remembered—Oliver's memories—spoke of orc chieftains, of Uruk-hai, of creatures bred for war. But those came later. Those came with Saruman's corruption, with Mordor's resurgence.
Unless I've already changed something. Unless the butterflies are already flying.
"Thank you, Bregol." I rested a hand on his shoulder—gently, aware of how fragile he seemed. "Rest now. You're safe here."
Safe. The word again. Meaning less each time I said it.
[POPULATION UPDATE: 47 → 65]
[FOOD SUPPLIES: 10 DAYS]
[MEDICAL RESOURCES: 40%]
[SYSTEM WARNING: RESOURCE STRAIN DETECTED]
Thorwen found me an hour later, her face drawn.
"The children will live. The fever's breaking. Your grandmother—Bregol's grandmother—she needs rest and food, nothing medicine can fix." She wiped her hands on a bloody apron. "That's the good news."
"And the bad?"
"Our supplies." She didn't sugarcoat it. "I've been stretching bandages for weeks. Willowbark stores are nearly gone. If we have another serious injury—another battle wound—I won't have what I need to treat it."
"Athelas?"
"Months since I've seen wild athelas. And even if we found it, it's not a miracle cure. It helps, but it doesn't replace proper medical supplies."
I ran the numbers in my head. Eighteen new people meant eighteen new mouths. Our hunting parties were already working at maximum capacity. The margin between survival and starvation had just shrunk from razor-thin to nonexistent.
"I need to go to Bree," I said.
Thorwen's eyebrows rose. "Now? With orcs in the hills and your arm still healing?"
"Three days' travel. We trade what we can, buy what we need. Food, medicine, information." I looked east, toward the invisible mountains where something big and organized was building strength. "We can't stay isolated forever."
"And if orcs hit us while you're gone?"
"Halbarad commands the defense. Grimbeorn finishes the forge. Maeglin keeps scouting." I flexed my injured arm experimentally—pain flared, bearable—and met her eyes. "I'm not irreplaceable. This settlement isn't me. It's everyone here working together."
"Noble sentiment." Her voice was dry. "Also wrong. You go, morale drops. Morale drops, people stop believing. People stop believing, and all this falls apart."
"Then I'll be quick."
[REFUGEE CAMP — EVENING]
I brought dinner to the refugees myself.
The same thin stew everyone ate, the same hard bread, but I made sure they got slightly larger portions than usual. The settlement could afford one night of generosity.
The young woman—Mira, I'd learned, mother of the two smallest children—found me near the cookfire.
"You didn't have to take us in."
"I didn't have a choice."
"Of course you did. Other lords would have turned us away. Eighteen more mouths, eighteen more problems." She studied me with eyes too old for her face. "Why didn't you?"
I thought about the question. Really thought about it.
"Because I know what it's like to have nowhere to go." The words surprised me—Oliver's truth bleeding through Aldric's mask. "To walk into the unknown hoping someone will help. Hoping the next place will be different."
"You weren't always a lord."
"I wasn't always anything I am now."
She nodded slowly, accepting the non-answer.
"My daughter has a doll," she said. "Burned, mostly. She carried it for five days, wouldn't let go. Her name is also Mira—the doll, I mean. Named after me."
I remembered seeing a small girl clutching something charred, refusing all attempts to take it from her.
"I'd like to meet her. If that's alright."
The girl was perhaps four years old.
She sat apart from the other children, holding the burned doll against her chest. One button eye remained; the other was just a dark spot where thread used to be.
"Hello." I crouched beside her, moving slowly. "I'm Aldric. What's your name?"
Silence. Her eyes—the same green as her mother's—watched me without blinking.
"Is that Mira?"
A tiny nod.
"She's very brave. She came all this way with you."
The girl looked down at the doll. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.
"She's scared. The fire hurt her."
"I know. Fire is scary." I settled onto the ground beside her, ignoring the pull on my healing arm. "But she's safe now. The fire can't hurt her here."
"Promise?"
The word hit like a hammer.
I promised Farren he'd be safe. I promised his children would never go hungry. How many promises can I make that I might not keep?
"I promise," I said anyway.
The girl—little Mira—almost smiled.
That night I studied my map by candlelight.
Bree lay three days west, through relatively safe territory. Trade was possible—our situation wasn't desperate enough to mark us as easy prey, not established enough to draw unwanted attention.
But the eastern situation demanded response too. Organized orcs. A speaking leader. Refugees fleeing destruction. Something was building in the mountains, and ignoring it wouldn't make it disappear.
Two problems. Not enough resources to solve both.
The knock at my tent flap broke my concentration.
"Come."
Halbarad ducked inside, his face grave.
"Bregol's talking. I thought you should hear what else he knows."
The old shepherd sat by the fire in the medical tent, hands wrapped around a cup of broth he'd barely touched.
"It started three months ago," he said. "Orc raids, but not like before. They hit at the same time, coordinated strikes across multiple farms. And they didn't take food—they took people."
My blood went cold. "Slaves?"
"Workers. Some came back after a few weeks, broken and silent. Most didn't come back at all." Bregol's voice dropped. "The ones who returned spoke of tunnels. Something being built in the mountains. Something big."
Tunnels. Construction. Organized labor.
This isn't random raiding. This is infrastructure.
"Did anyone see where the tunnels led?"
"No. But Harad—one of the men who escaped—he said they were digging down. Into the roots of the mountains." Bregol looked up at me with haunted eyes. "He said he heard things. In the deep places. Things that weren't orcs."
Halbarad and I exchanged glances.
"Thank you, Bregol." I kept my voice steady. "Rest now. You've told us what we needed to know."
After the old man shuffled away, Halbarad spoke.
"This is beyond orc tribes. This is something else."
"I know."
"We should contact the Rangers. Proper Rangers, not just me. This is the kind of threat they need to know about."
"I know that too." I stared at the map, at the mountains where something unknown was gathering strength. "But first we survive. First we trade. First we arm ourselves."
"And then?"
"Then we find out what's in those tunnels."
I spent the rest of the evening planning the trade expedition.
Five people. Light supplies. Fast travel. We'd carry preserved meat—our one surplus—and trade it for grain, medical supplies, and information.
The route to Bree was straightforward. The negotiations would be harder.
We're unknown. Unproven. A small settlement in the Weather Hills with nothing to offer but desperation.
But we had to try.
[SYSTEM STATUS]
[POPULATION: 65]
[FOOD SUPPLIES: 10 DAYS]
[MEDICAL RESOURCES: 40%]
[FORGE CONSTRUCTION: 60% COMPLETE]
[MILITIA STRENGTH: 28 TRAINED (BASIC)]
[NEXT LEVEL: 15 SXP REMAINING]
The numbers painted a picture of a settlement on the edge. One bad week—one failed hunt, one orc raid, one outbreak of disease—and everything I'd built would crumble.
But we'd survived our first battle. We'd taken in refugees. We'd learned that something worse was coming.
Tomorrow I'd select the trade party. Tomorrow we'd take the first step toward something larger than survival.
I looked at the map one more time. Bree to the west. Mountains to the east. Orcs in the darkness. Refugees in my camp.
One crisis at a time.
The candle guttered. I let it die.
Tomorrow started early.
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