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Plot summary: The world has grown very dark in the five hundred years since King Elessar's death. The last elf in Middle-Earth must face his past as well as the threat posed by those who would seek to destroy him.

Author's Note: The present in this resembles something close to Europe's so-called 'Dark Ages'. There will probably be some casual romance in subsequent chapters.

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Almiel picked at the frozen dirt with the spade. The morning mist had gradually dissipated, and the spires of the old buildings, now fallen into ruin, were revealed to her. They towered above her like people. The back of her neck prickled. She felt strange eyes upon her.

She looked in all directions but saw no one. Though the area had once been heavily forested (or so she had been told), the trees had largely been cut down long before her birth, so that only a few copses remained. The valley sloped gently to the river. She could see the lay of it all the way to the mountains on either side. There was no one around for miles. And yet she still felt as though she were being watched.

Sador would say it was the spirits that haunted the place and that they were angry with her for disturbing their peace. They were not ghosts, he liked to remind her, for they were not dead. Whoever had lived here, many hundreds of years ago, had not died, but simply faded away, until they were invisible to human eyes. Sador had warned his wife to keep away from the ruins. He had a healthy respect for the spirits and their magic. But Almiel did not believe in fairy tales and children's stories, and even when she was on her father's knee, listening to him spin yarns by the fire, she was largely pragmatic about them, a trait inherited from her mother. Being poor, she had more earthly fears, like keeping food on her and her husband's table. Invisible spirits were less frightening to her than the prospect of an empty belly.

Which is why she was at the ruins at all. She was digging in the dirt for treasure. The one thing that struck her about the old tales was that whoever had lived here all those years ago had been very wealthy, so wealthy that their riches were spoken of still. Almiel did not expect to find much. Scavengers had likely picked the place clean centuries before, but she was hoping they might have dropped something or missed a small trinket here or there. Anything she might be able to barter for a sack of grain.

The current winter was a harsh one. Heavy snows in November had blocked the mountain passes, cutting off the trade routes. Sador was a blacksmith. Although no food supplies had been able to get into the village for several months, he had managed, after their money was used up, to trade labor for food. This had kept them well stocked for a time. But last week, while sharpening a sword for the village mayor, he cut open his hand, slicing so deep that he nicked the bones of his palm. Almiel stitched him up, but the hand was now useless. He could not even curl his fingers around the handle of his hammer. For days the bellows sat idle, and without an apprentice to take over, he was forced to close his smithy.

Little by little they ate through their small store of wheat. The side of pork Almiel had salted and dried was already long gone. They had half a bag of beans left. As of yet she was too proud to beg, but she knew it would come to that if she came home empty-handed today.

The earth was hard, and she had difficulty breaking through it with her spade. She dug near a crumbled wall that must have once formed part of a great hall. A weathered arch curved overhead. She dug as deep as she could. When her spade snapped, she scrabbled in the dirt with her fingers, until they were blue with cold and swollen. Every so often she peered over her shoulder, to make sure she was truly alone. She berated herself whenever she did so.

"Foolishness! You're acting like Sador."

Indeed Sador had been too frightened to accompany her. The Watcher had been spotted recently, and he did not want to run into such a fell creature.

The Watcher! The gullibility of her husband vexed her to no end. To be taken in by such fables! No one but her ever seemed to question the fact that it was only the sots at the pub who ever saw him. They had differing opinions on who or what he really was. Some said he was a shapeshifter who took the form of a man with long black hair and a face like a flash of silver. Others said he was a spirit given flesh. And others still said he was a sorcerer. The usual narrative placed him as the guardian of the ruins, for he had once or twice been seen around them. He had a way of moving, witnesses said, of disappearing as soon as you clapped eyes on him, so that you never got more than a glimpse of him at a time. Where or how he lived no one could figure, but he was rumored to dwell somewhere at the bottom of the valley, perhaps in a hidden cleft, coming and going as he pleased.

Sightings of the Watcher had been recorded for many generations, but the description of him never changed. A tall man with long black hair. There was only ever believed to be one. He was undying.

Almiel supposed that if the Watcher did exist that he was a mortal man. Undoubtedly a hermit who chose to live apart from regular society. That was the only reasonable explanation. She did not try to explain the time discrepancy, how he could have been sighted over so many lifetimes of men without a change in his appearance. Her practical brain shut it out. She told herself that she was not afraid. Even so, the ruins had a sort of witchcraft about them. They made you see and feel things that were not really there. In such a place she did not want to run in to anybody. She would surely die of fright.

The hole she was digging was the tenth or eleventh she had dug that morning. So far she had unearthed nothing but rocks. Her hands were cut and bleeding for her efforts. Still she pressed on. She was determined to show her husband something. All day long, since he closed his smithy, he sat in his chair by the hearth, staring at the flickering coals. A great big man reduced to idleness. He was sunk in his mood and could not get out of it. Although he had warned his wife to keep away from the ruins, she had not heeded him. They had sold everything there was to be sold in their cottage except the cottage itself and her husband's tools. She would sell herself before it came to that. But she thought she would try her luck at scavenging first.

So far she had found nothing. Yet she would not despair.

Thinking of Sador and how she had only a few beans with which to make supper, and once those were eaten, nothing at all for breakfast tomorrow, she dug furiously, like a desperate cur through a trash heap. The hole was half an arm length deep when she finally stopped. She had ripped out a nail scraping it along something hard and flat. Trembling with cold and excitement, she brushed away the dirt pebbles, revealing a wooden surface. She dug around the object and discovered that it was much larger than she had at first thought. A few more careful minutes of digging and she had it extracted.

It was a shallow box that she held, about two hands wide and three hands long. Its depth was near to the thickness of her wrist. Magic must have been worked in its creation, for it was in immaculate condition, in spite of its long hibernation underground. The wood, though dirty, showed no signs of decay, which surprised her. Initially she mistook the box for a more recent object, perhaps buried there by a traveler wary of thieves, for they were common enough in those parts, particularly when times were hardest. She abandoned that hypothesis when she saw the lettering on the box's underside, which was really its top.

There were words on it in a language she did not know. She could only read and write her own name and recite the alphabet. These letters, if they could be called such, were unrecognizable to her. They had been carved into the wood and then painted in silver. She shivered, wondering if the words indicated some sort of spell or warning. Then, remembering herself, she promptly dismissed these notions.

It was the lock and hinges on the box that got her really excited. They were a shining white metal resembling silver that had not corroded. Immediately she imagined all the foodstuffs she would be able to afford with the lock alone. Enough to last the entire winter and more! The box's weight indicated something lay inside. Figuring its worth to be greater than that of the box itself, perhaps jewels or gold, she hit the lock with the broken spade, and when that failed to break it, she splintered the wood around it, until the lock came off as a separate piece. She pocketed it and lifted up the lid.

She was disappointed by what she saw: a book bound in brown leather. It seemed a plain thing to be housed behind a silver lock. The binding was unmarked. She picked it up and opened it. Of course she could not read what was written on the pages, but as she flipped through them, past character after character of flowing script, she grew enthralled by the beauty of the writing, and where previously she had been almost chilled to the bone, she forgot the cold and snow, and even the pain from her torn fingertips. There was a picture drawn on one page in black ink, and because she had not been expecting it, only more words, its sudden appearance startled her.

It was a drawing of a man leaning against a tree. He appeared tall and lithe, and his hair was long and blown about by an invisible wind. Although his pose was relaxed, his expression was fierce, almost challenging. He looked straight ahead, presumably at the artist taking his portrait, but now at Almiel, who was struck by the loveliness of his face. It was almost unearthly. She had never seen its like. Indeed, it did not seem to belong to her world at all, but instead to a forgotten age. There was an inscription below the drawing, but its meaning was lost on her.

"What do you want with this place?"

Almiel flinched. The book fell from her hands into the snow. She turned slowly, more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

The speaker was a man, hooded and cloaked, with black hair hanging around his face. At his hip was a sword, whose hilt he grasped.

Almiel knew instantly that this was the Watcher whom her husband feared.

"Please," she stammered. "I meant no harm."

"Be gone from here," the man said. He spoke in strange accents, not a native speaker of her language. "And do not come back. This valley is sacred. You and your people have desecrated it."

Almiel did not need a second warning. She scurried away, but before she had gone more than twenty paces, she ducked behind a low wall and looked back. The Watcher had thrown off his hood. He bent down to pick up the book lying open in the snow, and as he did so, his black hair parted, exposing a pointed ear. Perplexed and afraid, Almiel ran back to her village, not stopping until she was on her own threshold. Sador was waiting for her inside. She showed him the lock and told him of her meeting with the Watcher of the ruins. And as she spoke, greed sprouted within her, for she remembered the silver hinges, and she was sure there were more treasures besides. She forgot her fear of him. He had not harmed her, after all. Now that she had seen him, and confirmed his existence, she did not think he was so very frightening, despite what others had said. He was a menace. An idea formed in her head on how to get rid of him. It began as a seed but quickly took root. Soon she tied her family's fortunes to the Watcher, certain that once he was gone, they would rise.

The book was his, and so were the words inside it. He had written them half a millennium ago, when the world was very different than it was now.

He gazed out over the valley.

There were hardly any trees anymore. He remembered when the valley was full of them, all the way down to the river, which his people had called Bruinen, but which the men of the land now named Siltrindle in their odd tongue. They had come down from over the mountains, washing like a tide over the forest, cutting and burning, until the land was barren. And the house his father built nothing but rubble.

The elves had long since abandoned these shores. All other folk but men had either disappeared entirely or gone into seclusion. Men did not recall, not even in legend, a time when they were not alone.

Elrohir - for that was the Watcher's name, though no one had used it in centuries - was accustomed to the sight of the tree-less valley, but its ugliness never ceased to wound his heart. He was the last protector of the Last Homely House. That was the title he had given himself. He was charged, by his own doing, with keeping away the people of the village and any others that might wander through, for these ruins were the only relics still existing from that bygone age.

And yet he had thought he only guarded stones. Now this book - his book - had come back to him. For five hundred years he had lived without any reminders from that time except the stones. And he had accepted and grown familiar with what his life had become. The book rattled him. He bore it and the remains of the box back to the cave in the mountainside in which he made his home. For a long while he refused to look at it. He started a fire and prepared his usual meager meal of whatever roots and berries he could forage from the landscape. He sharpened his sword and mended his other weapons. But desire eventually got the better of him. He longed to look within those pages and relive those events, however painful, for the book was his account of the love he had lost long ago. It was the reason he remained alone here in Middle-Earth, even after all his kin, including his beloved brother, had crossed over the sea.

I don't expect to this to be read by many people, but a review - even just one - would be absolutely lovely!