Title: Hunger Games
Author: Dwimordene
Challenge: Natural Disasters: Famine
Summary: This is really a cheat, because I couldn't think of a way to write famine as a purely natural disaster.
Characters/Pairing: Gil-galad, Elendil, Elrond, Elendur
Rating: T
Book/Source: Appendices and Silmarillion
Disclaimer: I'm neither JRRT nor making money off this. I’m also not Suzanne Collins, nor making any money off of her work. Please don’t sue.
Author: Dwimordene
Challenge: Natural Disasters: Famine
Summary: This is really a cheat, because I couldn't think of a way to write famine as a purely natural disaster.
Characters/Pairing: Gil-galad, Elendil, Elrond, Elendur
Rating: T
Book/Source: Appendices and Silmarillion
Disclaimer: I'm neither JRRT nor making money off this. I’m also not Suzanne Collins, nor making any money off of her work. Please don’t sue.
The Dark Tower loomed, a mocking shadow.
“They’ll gain the walls,” Elendil said grimly. “Would we’d been swifter!”
“Patience be our strategy!” Gil-galad replied. “Sauron may endure, but his servants must eat.”
So they laid siege, and Gil-galad sent Elrond and Elendur to Nurn’s vast fields – to deny Sauron and feed their own.
Free the slaves, till the soil - seeming simplicity! But in that hostile heartland, they struggled seven years for ten acres here, a vale there, long supply lines buckling… Exhaustion threatening, Elrond ordered:
“What we cannot hold, we harrow, acre by acre: burn the crops, salt the earth!”
Notes: I'm in no way qualified to plan a siege, but from what little I've gleaned about laying them, the guy inside the tower had a serious advantage. Still - seven years, Tolkien? Seven? How did it take that long? Were the Elves and Númenoreans, at least some of whom were conducting sieges in the First Age, really that inept at cutting off Sauron's supply lines? How'd they feed themselves? Don't tell me they were trying to bring in supplies from Gondor all that time!
Hence my compromise. I hope it works well enough to trigger an unnatural famine.
Hence my compromise. I hope it works well enough to trigger an unnatural famine.