Intersections at Right Angles
By Verbosity
Chapter 9
Okay, Chapter 9! The next one should take them up to Redhorn Pass and through the journey to the gates of Moria. The chapter after that will be in Moria, probably with the big fight many of you have been waiting (and waiting…) for.
Generally I just let the characters do whatever they want to, but if there are any characters or things you want to see more of (or interactions I can improve upon), tell me. And constructive feedback usually does get me to write faster.
Andromeda offered to take all of the watches to allow the others more rest, but Aragorn rejected this, saying, "It is better for us if we grow accustomed to such hardship now, before the circumstances of the journey become dire. Though your watchfulness is something I would welcome; two sets of eyes will discern a danger more quickly than one."
Gandalf led the way at the front of the Fellowship, Aragorn beside him. The ranger knew the lay of the land even in the dark of night. Legolas and Andromeda, whose sight was the keenest, made up the rearguard. The others walked in file between.
Moving by night, they slept during the days, making their way slowly south and east through the barren lands toward the mountains. A fortnight into the journey the weather cleared. The gray glowering sky lifted, clouds scattering before a wind out of the north, and the day dawned, pale and cold, shedding its light down upon the wearily marching travelers.
In the golden light of morning they lit their fire in a great hollow, surrounded by the holly, and there was more good cheer in the meal then since they had set out from Rivandell.
Stomach's full, they sat around the fire, enjoying the light of the pale autumn sun, and spoke of merrier times. The hobbits chatted longingly of the Shire, while Boromir spoke of Gondor, and Gimli told of Moria.
"And you Rommie?" Pippin spoke up after Gimli had fallen silent. "Surely there are tales you could tell. I imagine the ones you have must be glorious. Full of all sorts of wonderful things."
"I'm not much of a storyteller Pippin." She glanced round at the company and, seeing their interested expressions, said, "But I'll try."
She considered what to tell them. Many of the things she could talk about involved concepts they had little grasp of. She decided to stick close to home.
So, after a moments thought, she began to tell them about the Andromeda Ascendant's encounter with the Magog world-ship, weaving the tale carefully. Trying to put concepts of an interstellar culture into terms that could be understood by those from a medieval one.
As she finished, round the fire there were expressions of wonder, amazement, and touches of confusion.
"I'm sorry I can't relate it more clearly. As I said I'm not much of a storyteller."
Gandalf spoke, "I think that it is not your telling that lacks, Andromeda, but our understanding."
"Indeed. Yet the heart of the story rings true, for it is common to all places. A valiant struggle against darkness and evil, and the value of never surrendering to despair." Aragorn said.
Andromeda smiled. "Dylan said something similar. When Beka questioned her ability to continue, he said, "All that matters in this world is that we try.""
"A wise man." The ranger said quietly then seemed to hesitate for a moment. "Andromeda, I remember your full name as you told it to Pippin and myself in the garden, days after you arrived. The name of the ship in your tale…" He trailed off, gazing at her in silent question.
"I was wondering if you would pick up on that. Yes, that's me."
The others, save Gandalf, looked between the two in confusion as Aragorn asked, "Is you? How is such a thing possible?"
Andromeda stared at him for a moment and then looked to Gandalf helplessly. "There's no way I can explain it."
Gandalf smiled at her and said to the others, "Think of her as more akin to the Valar and Maiar. Unable to cast aside her body and walk formless yet, like them, having other forms than the one you see before you."
"A ship to sail among the stars…" Boromir looked at her a new touch of wonder in his eyes. "As Vingilot carries Earendil."
"I suppose so." Andromeda said remembering the story from among the many told at Rivendell.
There was a long moment of contemplative silence around the fire, before it was interrupted, by the growl of Sam's stomach. Chuckles joined it a moment later and Sam's face grew red.
"I believe, my dear hobbit, that there is still a bit of dinner in the pan." There was a twinkle in Gandalf's eye as he spoke. "With which to quiet the beast you have hidden there."
"I couldn't, I've already had my share."
"So have we, Sam," Aragorn said. "Yours is the only stomach still hungry."
"I wouldn't go that far." Frodo said. "But Strider's right. Go ahead and eat it, Sam."
Sam made one more protest. "You haven't had anything in days, Andromeda. I know you said you don't eat and all, but…" He trailed off as she shook her head.
"Eat, Sam."
He dug in to the remainders, muttering about there being no way for a hobbit to get the proper number of meals under these conditions.
"Not eating," Merry said. He glanced away from Sam, to Andromeda. "What a horrible thought. Takes all the joy right out of life."
"I don't know, I find it kind of useful at times. I can eat if I want to, but my body just doesn't do anything with it."
"But how can you not eat? We would waste away. If I remember the stories right, even the Maiar who came to Middle-Earth had to." Pippin glanced at Gandalf as he said this. The old wizard nodded.
"Think of it this way Pippin: all of my life is stored inside me right now. Where all of you need to take in food to restore your energy, all of mine I already have."
Boromir considered this for a moment and then spoke, "What happens when this energy is at last exhausted?"
Andromeda smiled a little sadly, thinking that her current power cell was the last one she would likely ever have. "If I were home it could be replaced, but as matters stand, when it finally runs out, I'll die."
Her quiet statement was met with a heavy silence from round the fire.
"How long will this take?" Boromir asked softly. There was some unreadable emotion in his eyes.
"You don't need to worry, it will be years before I deplete it. Decades probably."
Everyone around the fire obviously found that a disturbing thought. Andromeda was touched by the fact that they so clearly cared.
It was strange she reflected. Back home, emotions were to be hidden and not shown unless one was in extremity, and even after, they were a source of embarrassment. The peoples of Middle-Earth didn't seem to have that taboo, they wore their hearts openly without any of the social deceptions that so bounded humans in the Commonwealth. She felt a sudden urge to find some way to comfort them.
"You don't need to be too sad," she said. "After all, it's just a part of me here. The rest of me, the majority in fact, is back home and if my existence ceases here, that part of me will continue." She gave a little shrug, "So, I won't be completely gone."
* * *
The passing of the crebain over their campsite jolted the company into caution and no more fires were lit. The silence that Aragorn observed in the land around them deepened as they moved east. Moving by night once again, they made their way toward the Redhorn Pass. It was approaching midnight when they struck a path headed in the direction of their travel. It looked to be the remains of an ancient road, once broad and well made, now crumbling into ruin.
Andromeda, walking beside Boromir this night, was keeping a careful watch on the surrounding countryside. Aragorn's restless agitation at the strange silence of the surrounding land made her extra cautious, thus her sensors caught a whisper of the thing's passage before it was even overhead.
It was big, whatever it was. Her head snapped up to try and find it even as she kicked her sensors into an active mode.
"Lady?" Boromir murmured.
She found it just about to pass above them about five hundred meters up. That's got to be a thirty-meter wingspan. The bio-readings are really off too.
It passed over and a moment later she heard Frodo whisper to Gandalf, "Did you see anything pass over?"
"No, but I felt it." The wizard was looking back toward Andromeda. "What did you see, Andromeda?"
"I'm not sure. Something big. I don't think it saw us. The wingspan was almost ten widths of this road across. The bio-readings were strange, as if the biological functions of the creature had been twisted around. It actually looked somewhat like the gene engineering I've seen."
If some of terms were unfamiliar to Gandalf, the meaning came through clearly, and he said, "Sauron has long been skilled at twisting both men and beast into other forms to serve his purposes."
"To see a creature of Barad-dur so far from Mordor, now of all times, is disturbing. It bodes ill." Aragorn said.
The other members of the company were alert now Legolas was scanning the sky and land around, his bow at the ready, while Gimli fingered his axe. Boromir had a hand on his sword hilt and was glancing uneasily at the sky. The hobbits were clustered nervously at the center of the group around Bill, the pony.
"The enemy has turned his gaze toward Hollin, searching for us. We must move with both speed and caution." Gandalf said.
The rest of the night was uneventful. It passed without any sign of either crebain or their other unnamed visitor. Passing into the foothills of the Misty Mountains, the path twisted and turned, climbing ever higher. That day they camped in the shelter of a dell filled with tumbled boulders and small trees.
The company slept in the shadows of the trees, save for Gandalf, who sat wrapped in his gray cloak upon a large partially sunken stone of granite.
Andromeda joined him on the stone and they sat gazing at the peaks in the distance.
"I've been meaning to ask you something. Well, lots of things actually, but I'll get to the rest later."
Gandalf looked back at her curiously, removing a pipe and a small packet from some inner pocket of his robes. Filling the pipe with pipeweed he lit it by murmuring some word she didn't recognize. That done he puffed on the pipe and looked at her inquiringly.
Sudden spark. No detectable cause. Hum.
"Some of the elves were disturbed by what I was, others not. The division seemed to cut along lines of race. The gray eyed dark haired, in general seemed less put off." She cocked her head to look up at Gandalf.
"Yes, the Noldor." He inhaled on the pipe for a moment then let out a smoke ring into the crisp mountain air.
Andromeda watched as it drifted slowly away before stopping a short distance in front of them to hover, still, in the air. Looking at it, she idly analyzed the airflow and heat induced dispersion of the smoke, and frowned. It shouldn't do that. She examined him out of the corner of her eye and spoke, "Stop that. It really screws with my perceptions when you start tinkering with physical laws."
An amused chuckle sounded from him and the smoke ring abruptly dispersed into the night breeze.
"What is it about the Noldor?" She prodded him.
The elves have a strong connection to the forces and nature of the world. Some have gravitated toward the crafting of new things, while others delight in the cultivation of nature. The Noldor had always a strong friendship with Aule and of old learned much from him. The crafting of substances- metals, gems, glass: all things that did not have life of their own. All these things he taught them. That you are life, given to the lifeless, is a thing of fascination to many of them."
"And the others?"
"They have not the kinship with Aule." He paused looking at her thoughtfully for a moment. "And this technology you speak of is in many ways like that which Sauron uses to his ends. For he was once a Maiar of Aule and much of his skill remains with him, even now. Sauron, in his creation wreaks only destruction, and I think that the elves see the end of what was, and the changing of the world in this thing you name technology. I think the change frightens them, for they cannot see where it leads."
He gazed off into the distance his eyes focused on some vision in his memory. When he spoke his voice was soft. "At the beginning Illuvatar showed the Ainur a vision of all that would be. Each perceived according to their stature, and none perceived it all, for Illuvatar kept much unrevealed. But in it I saw a fleeting glimpse of the end. It was a thing of such glory and splendor that in all the ages since, I have never found a language that had the words to describe it."
Andromeda sat in silence, beside the old wizard staring into the distance, pipe forgotten in one hand, gazing at a vision only he could see. There was a strange light in his face, transforming it into something more than human. It was a subtle thing, more felt then seen, and particularly disturbing to Andromeda who was still not used to perceiving things that didn't register on her sensors. A feeling she was unaccustomed to touched her and it took a moment to identify it: awe. She had heard him when told her that he was a Maiar, but she hadn't really thought about what it meant.
He was an entirely different order of life from any she had met. Strangely, or perhaps not so, she remembered what Tyr had once said, "I'd never seen an angel before."
Gandalf's gaze turned away from the distance and rested upon her. "Well, it's no use dwelling in memories, but whenever the burden becomes to great, I remember." And as simple as that, the remote being he had become for a brief moment, was gone, replaced by Gandalf. The Gandalf that gazed at her with what she had come to think a paternal look might be something like.
The sense of awe faded, to be replaced by a more mischievous bent. "So, I guess Harper's expression "older than dirt" really applies to you, hunh?
A surprised snort of laughter burst out of him before being quickly stifled. Aragorn, Legolas, and Boromir, all awakened by the wizards sudden laugh, looked toward the noise to see what was amiss. They saw only a grinning woman sitting next to an old man who was laughing silently so hard that tears were in his eyes. Legolas smiled and simply returned to his reverie. Boromir traded gazes with Aragorn, who shrugged and settled back into his sleeping roll. The warrior stared at the two on the rock for a long moment and then lay back down. He could hear the murmur of Andromeda's voice, but couldn't make out the words as she spoke to the wizard, and soon he was lulled back into dreams by the gentle sound.
