notes: well it's only been what...six years since I updated this? Geeze. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

a brief history: Ecthelion of the Fountain was one of the great Noldorin heroes of the First Age. He slew Gothmog, the Lord of the Balrogs, by tackling him into the fountain for which Ecthelion was named - well, for which his house was named. For Ecthelion was one of the lords of Gondolin, the great hidden city ruled by Turgon, one of the Princes (and eventually Kings) of the Noldor in Beleriand/Middle-earth. This story, however, takes place long before Gondolin was ever founded; this story takes place during the long trek across the ice that Fingolfin and his people were forced to endure in order to reach Middle-earth/Beleriand, after Feanor burned the ships he had used to sail across the sea...

~Ecthelion of the Fountain~

Ecthelion hunched his shoulders against the biting cold, wrapping his fur-lined cloak tighter around his body. Snow flurried against his face, driven on by the dervish of the wind, making it all but impossible for him to see anything but the faint glow of the torch borne by the next Elf in line.

They walked in single file, ropes wrapped around their waists and tied tight. They had already lost seven to crevasses—lost seven that they could have saved, if only they had been bound to an anchor. Instead they had fallen, fallen, fallen to their deaths, bodies breaking red and white and black against the ice and stones that opened up beneath their feet.

They had lost countless others as well, of course—lost them to the cold, to the night, to the hunters that stalked the wasteland of the ice. They had lost three to too-thin ice and frigid water; they had lost fifty-four to a snow-slide that had crushed them as they sought to climb a steep incline; they had lost seven to starvation; they had lost one to insanity.

Were they all doomed to die here, alone and afraid in this cold and barren bier of ice and snow? Was this the curse of the Valar, foretold and foreseen: That none should reach the far-distant shores of Middle-earth, save for Fёanor and his people, who had burned the boats instead of trusting? Were they all going to perish for the ruin of Fёanor's disloyalty?

Lost in thought, Ecthelion did not care to watch where he stepped. Straying to one side, eyes glazed over in the depths of his despair, he did not see the dip in the snow or the tell-tale warnings of unstable footing. So it was that he cried out in both shock and alarm as the snow gave out from under him and he fell, fell, fell into the dark and frigid air of a narrow, stony crevasse.

He jolted to a halt, the ropes binding him to the Elves before and behind him tearing into his chest and sides. Ecthelion gasped, coughed, and gasped again, breath wheezing in his compressed lungs. The torch he held slid from his numbed grasp, and went tumbling end over end down, down, down into the darkness, lighting the way until it landed, hard and devastating, on the stones. The wood shattered, and the fire flickered—then went out.

Terrified, blood thrumming in his ears, heart racing against his bruised ribs, stomach climbing into his throat, Ecthelion looked up. The lip of the hole through which he had fallen was at least a length above him; he swung gently back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the arc of his movement slowing and narrowing with each pass. He gripped the two sides of the rope until his knuckles turned white, and he swallowed fear past the lump in his throat.

"Hold on!" The voice sounded eternally distant. But then a face appeared in the air above the hole, and Ecthelion swallowed a cry of gladness alongside his fear, for it was Glorfindel. "Hold on, Ecthelion," he called down, and smiled encouragingly. "The others have braced you; you will not fall." Glorfindel's eyes blazed, and he added, his voice ringing with the power and majesty it only sometimes could, "This is not to be your end. Your end is yet to come—one of fire and of water, not one of ice and shadow." Then Glorfindel blinked, and the majesty bled out of his voice, and he was only himself once more.

There was movement above. Glorfindel turned away from Ecthelion, spoke to someone standing behind him, then gripped whatever was handed to him. He turned back to the hole and to Ecthelion, and then began to lower something long and narrow and dark: the haft of a spear.

Reaching up, Ecthelion gripped the end of the spear. Glorfindel rose, turning his head to speak to the person behind him again, and then began to take one labored step back, then another. Ecthelion swung, and he gripped the spear haft even tighter, breath catching in his throat. Then another set of hands joined Glorfindel's on the spear haft: Rog.

It took an agonizingly long moment, but at last, at last, at last Ecthelion's feet touched the edge of the crevasse, and his hands reached the lip of the hole. He scrambled up and out, Glorfindel abandoning the spear to grip his arms and heave him up. Snow slid and tumbled back into the crevasse as Ecthelion escaped—but he did not look back.

end notes: what did you think? And who do you want to see next? Let me know!