A/N: When I sat down with my hamster with the intent of making oboe reeds, I really did not expect to find myself writing a LotR fanfic. But the story came to me, demanding to be written, and I had no choice but to commit the words to paper. That being said: I take no responsibility for anything that might come out of this story; I'm merely a recorder.

Thanks to Ragnelle for the helpful critique. I've implemented some suggestions and working on others.

Disclaimer: I own nothing...literally.

A SONG OF STORM AND FIRE – by Lëlarë i-tharas

Bloodlines

Come sit here by my side, for the night is very long.

There's something I must tell before I pass along.

- Skellig – Loreena McKennitt

They say the land remembers all things, from the first rising of the moon to the last setting of the sun, and that if you listen, you can hear its voices calling to you, dissonant echoes of a past long faded beyond recall or desire. Time changes all things, wearing away eternally until there's nothing left save the unfulfilled promise of must once have been, and then gone, lost forever to the ravages of memory. But to my kind, the world was endless—twisted in an everlasting wind, yes, but never Not. Our part in it comes and goes, and we are quickly forgotten, but the story never ends, always continuing on to some new chapter in some other place, some other time.

Whether or not that story is happy or sad, I do not know; can even the wise see truly what fate awaits in some far distant day when out of sadness comes joy or through happiness fall to despair? That's the way with stories—you know the end will always work itself out, the world return to a day of light when the darkness was so great, though how such an end be achieved is forever veiled from your faltering sight. We lived always in the here and now; let others worry for the future. Our lives were short enough.

We are the ignoble, the forgotten, the unimportant: useful when desired, then shoved once more out of the picture to be called upon again at some later date. For so the tapestry is woven, ever focused on the fate of the free peoples of this Middle Earth, but they stood not alone. We were there, and we remember. We remember the hopes, and the sacrifices, and the world's ending.

We came from the shadow-shrouded veils of mystery, our past hidden in the obscurity of Before. That truth is forgotten. We have written it anew in the lines of our blood, descending unbroken father to son from Felaróf the Mansbane himself. And yet—

How he would be shamed to see us now, little more than the horses with whom we mingle. We have grown tame in these long years, our pride and dignity forgotten, allowing the egotistical two-leggeds to determine who is worthy to sit astride us. Once we would have killed them for daring such impunities upon us; now we blindly ignore it, trusting to the memories of the past to preserve us in this ever-changing world.

Yet never have we lost the calling of the wild in our ears, trilling beyond the blood coursing through our veins. Once we were free.

Someday, we shall be so again.