Chapter Two: A Stupid Virtue

"So she died?"

Gimli had not even been able to get the next sentence of the story out of his mouth before Wenny had interrupted him again. She was frowning, running her fingers through her pale hair, using her childlike desperation to figure out the rest of the story before Gimli told it to her.

"Why would you assume that?" Gimli asked, feigning annoyance.

"She drowned." Wenny said simply, like her answer effectively ended the conversation. "She would have died."

"If I had left people for dead all of the times that it had appeared life had left their body, I would have very few friends." Gimli paused, looking around the hall before addressing the little elf in a hushed tone. "And you might not have been born. So I suggest you hush up and let me get on with our little tale."

"Wait," Wenny moved closer to the dwarf, practically forcing herself into her lap. "What do you mean I might not have been born?"

"One story at a time Liluwen."

"Fine." She huffed slightly, settling herself down comfortably into his lap, ignoring the roll of his eyes at her actions. She reached her minuscule hands out to play with his beard, tugging slightly harder than was necessary. "You may proceed."

"Why thank you Princess." Gimli said with a derisive snort. He paused for a moment before opening his mouth to continue the story, ignoring, albeit playfully, the small hands tugging at his red beard.

Emelia should have known better to think that she would have been lucky enough to drown in that frozen river. It would have been entirely too easy, and entirely too simple. And she knew better to think that anything in her life would be simple. It hadn't been in the eighteen years previous, so it was rather preposterous to assume it would start then. She had lost consciousness very early on in her quick descent to the bottom of the river. She had felt her body bobbing and slipping further down, but realized that she couldn't even do anything about it. It felt like she had been shoved into another body that she had no control over, and even less awareness of her surroundings.

When she had blacked out she had thought she was dying.

The lights, which her mother always told her happened when you died, filled up her entire vision. She was so cold it hurt, and then there was nothing.

The nothing, as she had come to refer to it as in the months that followed, was some of the worst of her entire life. She felt like nothing. Emelia couldn't remember what faces looked like. She couldn't even remember herself.

It felt like an eternity before she was finally aware of her body.

At first the warmth in her limbs was barely recognizable. She was so cold the change in them was almost completely unnoticeable. The feeling was painfully slow in returning to her body. When it all of the feeling was back in her body she realized that she was, ironically, still bobbing around in some body of water. It was much warmer than she remembered ever experiencing. With the exception of the only heated pool she had been in on the singular family vacation the Montgomery's had taken, she had never actually been in a large body of naturally warm water. That kind of thing just didn't happen in Alaska. That fact alone was enough to send her into a semi-panic.

She had begun to ponder if she was really dead when her body collided painfully with something very hard and very smooth.

She had not even realized that her body had been moving until she spluttered about, dipping down under the surface of the water briefly before she finally managed to grip onto the hard abject for dear life.

Emelia did not consider herself to be a person who was prone to easy panic by any means. That being said, she felt her entire body convulse in sheer horror as she got her first look at her surroundings.

It was green. And warm. She could feel the heat of the air on her wet skin, making her feel like she was suffocating in the new climate. Of course it wasn't really the climate that had her panicking. It was more the fact that she was certainly not in Kessog, Alaska anymore.

She tried to push herself into the object, which turned out to be a very large moss covered rock, even further.

Her heart was beating erratically as she tried to take in everything around her.

It wasn't possible. She had just been in Alaska. It had been snowing and below freezing temperatures. She had been with her family. Her mother was going to make her an awful fishy soup.

She struggled to remain attached to the giant rock, feeling hot salty tears slipping down from her eyes, blending in with the warm water already clinging to her face. She was positive she was dead. There was no other explanation as to why she was currently molesting a rock in an attempt to keep from downing in some random river, still covered in her thick winter clothes. They were weighing her down, making her feel like she weighed much more than she actually did.

She felt her hands scrapping against the rock as she struggled to hold on, her entire body wracking with painful sobs. She ignored the stinging sensation from the cuts that she knew she must have on her hands as she clung desperately to the only thing that seemed real to her.

There were rocks in Alaska.

She tried to press her waterlogged body into the rock even further, feeling the horrendous pangs in her chest as her breast bone pressed into the hard surface. She paid no mind to the pain. It seemed so miniscule compared to the panic she was experiencing.

She sobbed even harder as the water flowed around her body, trying to pull her back down the river. Never in her life had she ever felt so horribly terrified and alone all at the same time. She had not even spent a night in any other city besides Kessog. It was snowy and cold all year, never even getting above freezing for a good portion of it. She had never even seen warmer weather. Her parents hadn't been able to afford to send the family on a vacation.

Emelia gripped onto the rock for what felt like hours before she finally realized that she needed to get out of the impossibly warm water.

She struggled to pulled herself to bank, slipping and sliding on the rocks that led up to the side. She had finally managed to get herself up into a standing position when she lost her footing again, sending her crashing down into the shallows of the river with a loud splash. It felt like the universe was conspiring against her as she felt the top of her wrist scrape painfully on one of the many rough rocks that lined the bank.

She used her other arm to pull herself the rest of the way onto the bank, landing in a small pathetic heap. She pulled her legs up into her sore chest, sobbing into the thick material that covered her knees. They were ripped and ratty from her little trip down the unknown river, making her feel even worse.

Her mother had bought those pants for her as an eighteenth birthday present.

It wasn't until darkness began to fall over that she finally stopped her crying.

She sat up, feeling the soreness in her body from lying haphazardly on rocks for the past six hours, looking around her surroundings.

Emelia had long ago forgone the idea and notion that she was dead. Her afterlife would not have included floating down some godforsaken river in the middle of a bleeding forest. She wouldn't have been able to get hurt if she had been dead. She would have liked more snow.

She struggled to lift her tired body off the ground, stumbling slightly on the uneven surface. Her entire body cracked and creaked with the motion, making her feel like she was much older than only eighteen years old.

The place that she found herself in was pretty. As much as she hated herself for thinking so, it was undeniable. The trees were just in the first blushes of summer, making their vivid green stick out even in the dim light of evening. The warm climate rolled over her winter clad body, instantly causing perspiration to spring up underneath her damp clothes. She, almost hesitantly, pulled off her out layers, before folding the coat and top layer of pants on the ground beside her.

The sight of the clothes that her mother had given her lying on the ground made more, hot, fresh tears spring up painfully in her eyes.

It seemed so cruel that she was alone in some place she had never even been to. It seemed like a punishment. Some form of getting her back for some crime she had no recollection of committing. Whatever the reason, it seemed hardly fair.

She felt her body getting chilled as the evening slowly turned into night with her standing on the bank. She felt colder from fear than anything else. When she had washed up on the bank she hadn't had anything useful on her person. No fishing knife, which she usually kept on her person when her family went fishing. No spear, no matches, no means of communication. She had nothing. The thought of that alone was enough to make her want to curl up in another little ball and wait for the morning to come.

She shook her head, willing herself out of her dismal mood long enough to get enough sense in her to find a place to settle down for the night.

Emelia knew how to do that well enough.

She bent down to gather up her discarded top layer before moving tentatively towards the underbrush that was near the river. She did not relish the idea of spending the night in a bush, but she knew better than to plop herself down on the rocks out in the open.

She would just be asking for some wandering maniac to kill her if she did that.

She came upon a bush, taking note of the fact that she didn't think it was poisonous, before throwing down her top layer of pants as a makeshift pillow. She crawled underneath it, dragging her still slightly damp winter coat over her body to use as a blanket. It stuck to her body uncomfortably, adding to her ever mounting sense of dread and panic.

She wasn't home and that scared her.

She didn't know if her brother was okay and that scared her.

And above all else, she was completely alone for the first time in her life and that scared her so completely it physically hurt.

She wasn't ashamed to admit to anybody who asked her in the coming future that she cried herself onto a horribly uncomfortable and nightmare ridden sleep.

Emelia had hoped that by going to sleep she would wake up and be in her nice warm bed, pushing her brother out of her room for waking her up prematurely. Perhaps if she slept, she would wake up to her mother smiling at her, tucking some of her wild hair behind her ear, before ushering her to the kitchen for a haphazard breakfast.

Perhaps she would wake up and her little nightmare in the river wouldn't have ever happened.

The fates were not on her side, it seemed. For she did not wake up in her own comfy bed, with her family around her telling her that it was all just a horribly cruel dream. She didn't even wake up by her own choosing. She had barely lain down on her makeshift pillow when she was being hoisted into the air so quickly it knocked all of the breath out of her completely. It appeared that her plan of staying in the bushes to avoid being set upon in her sleep had been a supremely bad one.

"What is it?" A voice said from somewhere besides her, forcing her to realize that she wasn't, as she had sincerely hoped, still dreaming. "It looks tasty don't it?"

Emelia barely had time to let out a scream when she felt herself swinging back and forth some fifteen feet above the ground that she had just been sleeping on. She let out a cry of surprised before she felt her body being squeezed very tightly. She squirmed even more when she felt a very intense pressure on her abdomen that spread form her middle all the way up and down the rest of her body. She felt the blood rush to her head form being held upside down, making her already hazy vision even worse.

"Let's cook 'er." Another voice said. She swung around for a moment before she felt a very painful jab to her legs, causing even more shooting pain.

"How do yer know it's a she?" A third and much higher pitched voice said.

"Look at 'er." If Emelia wasn't experiencing vertigo, she certainly was after that comment. She was swung around so suddenly it sent her entire head spinning. "Look at 'er chest."

Emelia was quite certain she was being punished when she got her first look at her captures. They were some of the ugliest things she had ever seen in her entire life. They were huge, that much was clear by the fact that one of them was holding her up in the air by just her mid-section. They might have alarmed her less if she had ever seen something that looked remotely like them. They looked like a weird human cross between the backside of an elephant and something that would come out of the nose of a particularly unhealthy influenza sufferer.

They did not look particularly bright, what with their dull crisscrossed eyes and blank expressions. Nor did they exude any sense of cleverness about what to do with something that they caught besides eating them. They snuck worse than any fish guts Emelia had ever smelt and covered their sparsely hairy bodies with much less than she would have ever considered appropriate.

They would have looked laughable if it weren't for the fact that one of them was poking her already sore chest with one of its meaty fingers, causing her to sway with every touch.

"She's so tiny." The smallest one said, spitting slightly from behind its brown teeth. "She won' even be a fillin'."

"Then we keep 'er 'till we find somethin' to go with 'er." The one that had been poking her chest said, revealing his air of authority to the other one.

Emelia was rather ashamed with her flight or fight reflexes. She should have been kicking, punching, biting, and head-butting her way away from the massive creatures. She should have, but for some unfathomable reason, she just couldn't bring her body to respond to her brains panic signals. She should have been fighting to get out, but she just couldn't. All she could do was sit there and sway back and forth, rather stupidly, and listen as the three monsters discussed the way they would eat her.

"The sun is comin'." One of them said suddenly, stopping the other two's argument. "Let's go."

Emelia could feel her consciousness slipping for the second time in what she assumed was a day. Being held upside down did not help her already feeble mental fortitude. She felt her eyes fluttering shut, becoming tight from all of the blood flooding her brain.

Maybe if she was lucky, they would just eat her while she was sleeping.

"I think that is enough for tonight Gimli."

Gimli looked up suddenly from the little elf child that was leaning into his chest, listening so intently to his story she had stop playing with his beard subconsciously. She still held onto the long red strands, pulling on them slightly, but her hands had gone almost completely slack in her little lap, making it appear as if his beard was a very furry blanket that covered her very small body. She immediately looked up at the sound of the voice, disappointment written all over her pale face.

Legolas was looking down at both of them with a slight smile on his angular face. He had been listening, with the utmost discretion, from across the room. He had noticed the way his daughter's eyes lit up with every single word his old friend said, capturing her youthful fascination. He hated to interrupt them, but as luck would have it, it was well past her predetermined bed time. He had delayed it as long as possible, even allowing himself to slip away to speak with his father before he went to bed, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to wait forever.

"Oh Ada, you have to listen to this story." Wenny said, not even bothering to move from her spot in Gimli's lap.

"Of course she likes my story when you're here Legolas." Gimli said, grumbling slightly. "Yer little offspring is a proper menace when left alone."

"I wasn't alone, Gimbles," Wenny paused when Gimli spluttered angrily at the ludicrous nickname. "I was with you."

"I quite like that name little Liluwen." Legolas said simply, reaching his arms out to pull her out of the grumbling dwarf's lap. "Gimbles." He ignored the foul look that Gimli sent him as he situated his daughter in his arms. "Your mother is waiting for you. She says it's time for your bath."

"I don't like baths." Wenny whined, earning a very loud chuckle from the dwarf.

"You're positive she is elf kind?" Gimli asked, earning a glare from all of the elves in the vicinity.

"Just because I don't like baths it doesn't make me a dwarf." Wenny said, laying her head on her father's shoulder.

"No, but it does make you very similar to yer Ma." Gimli laughed out loud when he saw her nose wrinkle up at the accusation.

"Ada, I don't want to go to bed." Wenny whined, sounding very, just as Gimli had said, to her mother. "I want to hear the rest of the story."

"Oh don't worry, little Wenny," Gimli said, lifting his own tired body from the chair for the first time in hours. "There is still much more to tell."

"Patience is a virtue." Legolas said simply, placing a soft kiss on his daughter's pale forehead. "The story will wait for you, I am sure, as will Master Gimli."

"Patience is a very stupid virtue." Weeny said, leaning back away from Legolas' shoulder, crossing her little arms over her chest in frustration. It was during moments like that, that he was positive he was looking at a miniature of his wife. The similarities between the two of them were starling at the best of times.

"I think the little princess needs her sleep." Gimli said, barely able to control his laughter at the antics of the little girl. "She gets cranky when she is tired."

"Emelia will still be there when I wake up?" Wenny asked, sounding almost embarrassed by the nature of her question. She seemed very reluctant to admit that she was, in fact, quite enjoying Gimli's story.

"Emelia isn't going anywhere." Gimli said, smiling despite himself at the bright smile that lit up the little elf's face. "Not just yet."

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