(Author: Jennzah)
Day turned to night as she fell, with a splash, into a gross looking
pond or lake. "Eww!" The water was black and slimy.
She pulled herself out of the water, disgusted. The water smelled foul,
and she shivered as she stood. Then a rock hit her in the face.
"OW!" she yelled, rubbing the spot on her cheek where it had hit. Another
rock flew past her nose, narrowly missing her again.
"what the…" she cried. She squinted and saw that there were two children
throwing rocks into the water.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Stop that! You've hit me once already and it hurts!".
The two children looked at her funny as she came closer. They looked
at each other and started speaking in some language that only they probably
knew how to speak.
She stumbled over some sunken tree branches as she walked towards the
shore, the water getting shallower. A man dressed in black came up to the
two children.
"Do not disturb the water!" he scolded. He looked into the lake and
saw Leila, standing there, soaking wet, and feeling slimy.
"Who goes there!" he called, drawing his sword out.
Leila stopped walking forward at the sight of the sword. "What in the
hell?" she thought. "Nobody carries swords.. What the hell happened? Did
I hit my head?"
"Hey!" she called back in her thick accent. "There's no need to pull
out a sword! Where did you get that anyway!"
She could see better now, the moon had sprung out and she saw that
she was facing some great mountain. There were more than just the two children
and the man sitting on the shore; in fact there were more children and
what looked to be three other men and one young woman.
The man who had pulled the sword at her resheathed it and walked to
the shore to inspect. "Who are you, Lady!" he called.
"Lady…" Leila thought. "I think I must have knocked myself out or something..
Maybe this is just a dream…oh well. Perhaps Ill just go along with it."
"I'm Leila!" she called out. "I slipped and fell. Who are you?"
Another man came down to inspect the new arrival. "Who is the lady?"
he asked the man already standing on the shore.
"I do not know." The other man replied.
Leila was getting colder by the minute, and she thought she felt some
fish swirling at her feet or something, and she did NOT like fish. She
started to wade into the shore.
When she finally reached the bank, the second of the two men came up
to her. "What did you say your name was?"
"Leila." She replied. He was tall, this man, and wore weird clothes,
it looked like the old mail-shirts that the people in the middle ages wore.
"Well, Leila, I am Boromir of Gondor. Where are you from? And what
in the name of the king are you doing in such a place?"
Leila just looked at him and started immediately to laugh. "Boromir?
Oh lord, that's rich." Despite how cold she was, she fell to her knees
in front of Boromir and held her stomach as she laughed.
Boromir did not understand why the girl would laugh like that. "Lady,
I don't see what is so funny."
Leila looked up at him and snorted again with laughter. "Your name
is Boromir? Like the Boromir in the Tolkien book?"
Boromir looked indignant. "I know not of what book you speak. Please,
stand up."
Leila stood, her sides still shaking with laughter. She stopped laughing
when the man who had drawn the sword came up to her.
"Lady," he said. "These are dangerous waters. What are you doing in
them?"
Leila looked at him. "Who are you?" she asked.
"Aragorn, son of Arathorn." He said.
It was all Leila could do not to start laughing again. This was too
much for her; she knew she must be dreaming. But it all seemed way too
real. "I'll just play along, I guess." She thought again. "When I wake
up im going to have a fun time trying to write all this down!" She looked
over to the man who said he was Aragorn.
"I'm Leila." She said. "Where in the hell are we?"
Aragorn looked at her funny. "Do you not know where you are?"
"Some really dark watery place, by a mountain?" Leila replied.
"This is the entrance to the mines of Moria." Aragorn replied. "It
is quite dangerous, and for a Lady to be here by herself is unthinkable."
Leila was having way too much fun with this. "Moria." She said. She
looked and saw that there was in fact, some sort of passageway that was
closed, but illuminated with the moonlight. She saw the writing that looked
a lot like the writing in her copy of Lord of the Rings.
"Bleeding Hell!" she uttered under her breath. "It IS the gate to Moria"
The guy claiming to be Boromir interrupted her thoughts. He'd taken
her arm and was trying to lead her away from the waters edge.
'Come, Lady. The water is not safe." He said, leading her gently away
from it.
"Yeah, no kidding," she said under her breath again. "If this dream
involves Tolkien in anyway, something bad is in that water."
He led her over to where a guy with a pointed hat and a long stick
was trying to open the door she'd seen. He let her sit down on a rock across
from him.
"Gandalf!" she said loudly, so he looked up at her. The guy had to
be Gandalf.
"Yes?" he said. "Who may you be?" He peered at her. "Where did you
come from?"
"From the lake!" Boromir proclaimed as he sat down next to her." She
came out of the lake!"
Leila shook her head. This was too wild. She looked over to the shore
again, where the two children had been throwing rocks at her. They were
now staring at her. In fact, as she looked around, she saw that all the
people around her were staring at her. Behind Gandalf, two people, a young
blonde man with bright blue eyes, and a young woman, also blonde, with
bright amber eyes stood. They were beautiful to look at.
"Elves." Leila whispered. They could only be elves, because they had
a sort of glow illuminating them, and they had no physical flaws that she
could tell.
Next to the elves were two more children. She looked at them, then
to the two that had been throwing rocks. They weren't really children at
all, she realized. They were hobbits.
"Oh, sweet lord." Leila said. "Bloody hobbits!" she didn't know whether
to laugh or cry. She wondered which one was Frodo. She scanned over them
again, and the one with the bluest eyes she decided must be Frodo. She
wondered if he had the One Ring on him too, if this was an accurate dream.
After she'd checked out Gimli, whom she knew was a dwarf; she decided
that one of the two elves must be Legolas. But she had no idea who the
second elf was. There was no record of a girl elf, outside of Arwen, in
the book. So maybe this was Arwen?
"This dream just keeps getting more and more bizarre," she thought.
"I hope that im not lying in a ditch somewhere."
She spoke up. "So…" she said, looking at the girl elf. "Are you Arwen?"
The girl elf stared back at her with her glittering eyes, and then
looked over at Aragorn. He turned his head and listened intently.
"Arwen?" the girl elf said to Leila in her soft voice.
"Yeah. Is your name Arwen?" Leila looked at her. She always thought
Arwen would look different. Arwen had dark hair, she thought.
The girl elf looked at Legolas, then at Aragorn.
"She asked you if your name was Arwen," Aragorn said to the girl-elf,
in a language that Leila did not understand.
The girl-elf looked astonished. "Why would she ask that?" she replied
in the same tongue.
Aragorn looked at Leila. "Why do you ask if she is Arwen?" he said
to her, this time in a language she understood.
"Well, she's an Elf, right?" Leila asked.
"She is." Aragorn replied
"Well then, is she Arwen? Cos I don't know of any other girl-elves
except for Arwen."
Aragorn looked dumbfounded. "Well, I do not understand that. But no,
she is not Arwen."
Leila was confused. The girl elf was standing there, clad in a blue
dress, that binded to her body snugly. She was a small thing, and Legolas
was taller than her. She had a quiver of arrows strapped to her back as
well, as did Legolas. Maybe she was some warrior elf that Leila's imagination
made up.
"Well then, who is she?" Leila asked Aragorn.
"Her name is Jairah, daughter of Sandros. From southern Mirkwood."
Leila pondered that for a minute.
"Wait a tick," she said. "Why is she here? Isn't this pretty dangerous
for a girl-elf?"
Jairah looked at Aragorn. "What does she say?" she said to him in Elvish.
"She wants to know why you are here, she thinks it too dangerous for
a girl-elf to be here." Aragorn replied.
"Tell her I am here to protect Frodo, and my own personal affairs."
Jairah told him, looking hard at Leila.
"She says that she is here to protect the Ring-Bearer, and is also
here for her own personal reasons." Aragorn said to Leila.
"Personal reasons?" Leila asked. She looked at Jairah, who was still
staring at her.
Aragorn looked at Jairah again. "Yes. Personal affairs being that Legolas
is her betrothed, and she was unwilling to stay behind in Rivendell, no
matter how he pleaded."
"Legolas is getting married?" Leila said incredulously. "No way!"
Jairah looked at her, looking at her and Legolas in disbelief and edged
closer to him, she did not trust the newly arrived girl. She was human,
after all. Jairah did not trust many humans outside of Aragorn.
"And who are you?" Jairah finally called over to Leila. "And what are
you doing here?" She spoke in Elvish, so Leila did not understand her.
"Why in the hell can't I understand you?" Leila said, looking back
at Jairah. "Are you speaking Elvish?" She looked at Aragorn.
Aragorn looked at her again. "Yes. It is Elvish. You do not speak it?"
"No! Nobody does!" Leila said in frustration.
Aragorn looked dumbfounded again.
"You must come from a very strange place, indeed, Lady." Boromir said,
breaking into the conversation. "I would much like to hear about it someday."
"I bet you would." Leila said back to him. He was looking at her kinda
funny. She stared back at him, noticing that he was really quite handsome.
Gandalf broke into her thoughts when he stood up again and started
mumbling something into the doors that were still tightly closed.
"Hey!" Leila said. "You can't open that door?" She had suddenly realized
that she knew how to do it, of course she did, she had read Lord of the
Rings tons of times.
Gandalf looked at her. "No. It is some form of riddle. We need to know
the password."
"Did you speak friend? That's what you do, you speak friend and enter."
She said, smiling.
Boromir looked at her funnily. "For someone who does not speak Elvish,
you read it well enough."
Leila was about to tell him that she didn't know how to read Elvish
when she decided that it might not be a bad idea to keep it quiet, because
he'd want to know how she knew that it said "Speak Friend and Enter". She
turned back to Gandalf.
"Say 'melon'" speaking the word like the fruit. In her thick Scottish
accent it sounded nothing like the Elvish word.
"Melon?" he asked.
"Or.. uhm.. what's the Elvish word for friend? Melon, right? Maybe
im not saying it right."
Gandalf looked at her again, then spoke it : "may-lon" was how it sounded.
The whole of the group looked at the doors as the opened, smoke billowing
out of the crack where the doors separated.