I wanted to walk, knowing full well that I told Haldir I was going to
sleep. My paces matched a beat from a song that my mother used to sing to
me as a child. elfling, I painfully corrected myself.
The song was a slow, sad tune that her mother sang to her as a child in Rohan when nightmares haunted her sleep.
"The night is here,
Yet there is nothing,
That should cause your fear,
For I will always be here,
To love you,
And dispel your fear."
As I neared my home, I noticed that some of the elves had been kind enough to bury my family and mark their graves. I would come back later, so I passed silently by as a shadow from the moonlight.
Stepping onto the front mat, outside the doorway, I lay my hand on the cool metal handle and banged my head on the thick wood paneling, for the first time getting a splinter. I smiled, relishing the momentary pain, and hoped that it would scar, leaving a visible remembrance of my first home.
Turning my wrist to undo the catch, I allowed the door creak slowly open from the sighing of the wind. I slipped through into the kitchen, pausing to find my mother's favorite knife from the cutting board. The knife was the only elven device in the house and Father had given it to mother as a wedding gift. The hilt was a dark ebony wood with thin tracings of a white metal in the form of a tree throughout. Iron was the blade, and it would never lose the razor-sharp edge like the other knives we had. I found the leather sheath my mother had roughly sewn together and slipped the knife into it.
Taking one sweeping look through the small kitchen, my eyes fell to the floor. more accurately to a small, forlorn - looking black object lying near a table leg. I swooped it up, knowing what it was immediately. It was my sister's small wooden horse, the toy all four of us had played with at her age. Father had carved it when I was about three, and stained it a dark brown. I barely remember the day I had seen my father return from the barn, toy in purple-looking hands. The dye seemed to stain other things more often than wood. I, along with Gunther, Keiro and Mala had each spent hours and hours with this plaything.
I forced myself to move on. The hard part was to come, and tears were already threatening to fall.
I cracked open the door to my parents' bedroom, and only remained inside long enough to grab my father's long pipe and empty pouch of pipe-weed. The hobbit's face flashed through my mind, and I saw both my father and Master Merry reclining on a summer day and mulling over the best kinds of pipe- weed and other items.
Stepping into the small hallway, more out of remembrance than necessity, I knocked on my brother's door. I even half imagined him to be slumped over on his chair in sleep, or lying propped up on pillows on his bed, reading his favorite book. He was strange that way. The small leather bound book I located on the shelf, and hugged it to my chest. This had also been mine, until Keiro claimed it a few years before, when Mother had needed to find more bedtime books for him. He soon would not let anything else be read to him, nor would he let me borrow my own book. A huge lump formed in my throat and my breathing became labored as I realized we wouldn't have to fight over reading rights anymore.
I slipped across the hall into my room, to collect the necessary items for my impending journey. It was obvious that I couldn't stay here for very long, but I still did not want to leave. This was my home, after all. This is where I grew up. The house my father built with his two weathered hands, the rooms my mother filled with trinkets and other small meaningful things from Rohan, and the places I remembered playing with my brothers and sister. Even where I was born, though I had no memory of that, of which I am almost thankful. I must have been a terribly noncompliant toddler.
A small half-smile formed on my face, and it quietly worked its magic to nearly clear away most of my sadness. Quickly, I shoved a new set of clothes in my knapsack, as well as my second favorite book, a quill and a few other personal items. Including a hairbrush. Haldir will be happy.
Haldir.
What was I going to do about him? I paused, my hands suspended in the air holding the bag open, like I was frozen in a winter storm. The Marchwarden had certainly been kind to me, he even treated me as an equal when we wrestled with his brothers, Rúmil and Orophin.
'No, don't think of them now. Now is not the time for the Wardens, but for the life I must leave.' I reprimanded myself mentally, not daring to break the stillness inside my house, as I relinquished my diary into a pocket of my knapsack. Finally, with one last memory-filled scan of my room, I stepped out and shut the door behind me, leaving the rest of the room as I had found it.
One room left.
Gunther's.
I bit my lip so hard that I tasted salt, and my eyes filled with tears from the thought of Gunther, not the pain. Pain did not register in my brain then.
'I don't have to do this. I don't have to go in there. After all, I do have his cloak.' My mind was trying to back out, and take the easy path by not facing the pain.
But suddenly, I heard one verse from my mother's song, chanted in my mind by a decidedly male voice. Never had I heard my brother sing the words from this song before. It had always been mother's to sing, though we would all follow her words in wonderment.
"For I will always be near, to care for and love thee, never forget, my Beloved, I will always be here"
"To love you and dispel your fear." I finished with him, our voices in a ghostly harmony in the darkness of the room. We sounded akin to the rushing of the wind through reeds near the river, or the screech of a lone owl over the plains.
That did it. Tears flowed down my face in a steady stream and my voice cracked and disappeared. I opened the door to Gunther's room and tossed myself onto his bed. I don't know how long I was there, but that was the first, but not the last, time I realized that they were gone.
I wept on Gunther's bed until no more tears would come, nor could another sob escape.
The hardest thing I have ever done, to this day, was to leave that bed.
I knew what of his I wanted to take, but I also understood that I had a limit of what I could carry. No matter how I tried, there was no way I could take his whole quilt - the quilt I made him - with me. It pained me - almost as much as leaving it there - to cut off our favorite corner.
The square was of two horses galloping together across plains of long amber grass, which alone took me nearly two months to finish. Every tedious stitch and pricked finger was worth it when I saw the look on his face when I gave it to him for his seventeenth and last birthday.
I knew both the horses in real life; the black one was modeled after Gunth's Coal, his favorite, while my favorite was the brown one, Maethor. My brother and I sometimes used to ride together, racing each other over dunes and hillocks in the moonlight.
Finally, as the darkness began to lessen, and as a grayish-pinkish hue formed at the horizon, I shut the door to my home for the last time. It creaked slowly and sadly, as if my house knew we would probably never meet again.
I slung my bag over my shoulder, the bow and quiver of arrows I carried from the kitchen whacking my knee and thigh with each step. Turning my back on my childhood home, I took my first step towards the tall tree, now many times smaller from a distance.
Mallorn, Haldir called it.
The song was a slow, sad tune that her mother sang to her as a child in Rohan when nightmares haunted her sleep.
"The night is here,
Yet there is nothing,
That should cause your fear,
For I will always be here,
To love you,
And dispel your fear."
As I neared my home, I noticed that some of the elves had been kind enough to bury my family and mark their graves. I would come back later, so I passed silently by as a shadow from the moonlight.
Stepping onto the front mat, outside the doorway, I lay my hand on the cool metal handle and banged my head on the thick wood paneling, for the first time getting a splinter. I smiled, relishing the momentary pain, and hoped that it would scar, leaving a visible remembrance of my first home.
Turning my wrist to undo the catch, I allowed the door creak slowly open from the sighing of the wind. I slipped through into the kitchen, pausing to find my mother's favorite knife from the cutting board. The knife was the only elven device in the house and Father had given it to mother as a wedding gift. The hilt was a dark ebony wood with thin tracings of a white metal in the form of a tree throughout. Iron was the blade, and it would never lose the razor-sharp edge like the other knives we had. I found the leather sheath my mother had roughly sewn together and slipped the knife into it.
Taking one sweeping look through the small kitchen, my eyes fell to the floor. more accurately to a small, forlorn - looking black object lying near a table leg. I swooped it up, knowing what it was immediately. It was my sister's small wooden horse, the toy all four of us had played with at her age. Father had carved it when I was about three, and stained it a dark brown. I barely remember the day I had seen my father return from the barn, toy in purple-looking hands. The dye seemed to stain other things more often than wood. I, along with Gunther, Keiro and Mala had each spent hours and hours with this plaything.
I forced myself to move on. The hard part was to come, and tears were already threatening to fall.
I cracked open the door to my parents' bedroom, and only remained inside long enough to grab my father's long pipe and empty pouch of pipe-weed. The hobbit's face flashed through my mind, and I saw both my father and Master Merry reclining on a summer day and mulling over the best kinds of pipe- weed and other items.
Stepping into the small hallway, more out of remembrance than necessity, I knocked on my brother's door. I even half imagined him to be slumped over on his chair in sleep, or lying propped up on pillows on his bed, reading his favorite book. He was strange that way. The small leather bound book I located on the shelf, and hugged it to my chest. This had also been mine, until Keiro claimed it a few years before, when Mother had needed to find more bedtime books for him. He soon would not let anything else be read to him, nor would he let me borrow my own book. A huge lump formed in my throat and my breathing became labored as I realized we wouldn't have to fight over reading rights anymore.
I slipped across the hall into my room, to collect the necessary items for my impending journey. It was obvious that I couldn't stay here for very long, but I still did not want to leave. This was my home, after all. This is where I grew up. The house my father built with his two weathered hands, the rooms my mother filled with trinkets and other small meaningful things from Rohan, and the places I remembered playing with my brothers and sister. Even where I was born, though I had no memory of that, of which I am almost thankful. I must have been a terribly noncompliant toddler.
A small half-smile formed on my face, and it quietly worked its magic to nearly clear away most of my sadness. Quickly, I shoved a new set of clothes in my knapsack, as well as my second favorite book, a quill and a few other personal items. Including a hairbrush. Haldir will be happy.
Haldir.
What was I going to do about him? I paused, my hands suspended in the air holding the bag open, like I was frozen in a winter storm. The Marchwarden had certainly been kind to me, he even treated me as an equal when we wrestled with his brothers, Rúmil and Orophin.
'No, don't think of them now. Now is not the time for the Wardens, but for the life I must leave.' I reprimanded myself mentally, not daring to break the stillness inside my house, as I relinquished my diary into a pocket of my knapsack. Finally, with one last memory-filled scan of my room, I stepped out and shut the door behind me, leaving the rest of the room as I had found it.
One room left.
Gunther's.
I bit my lip so hard that I tasted salt, and my eyes filled with tears from the thought of Gunther, not the pain. Pain did not register in my brain then.
'I don't have to do this. I don't have to go in there. After all, I do have his cloak.' My mind was trying to back out, and take the easy path by not facing the pain.
But suddenly, I heard one verse from my mother's song, chanted in my mind by a decidedly male voice. Never had I heard my brother sing the words from this song before. It had always been mother's to sing, though we would all follow her words in wonderment.
"For I will always be near, to care for and love thee, never forget, my Beloved, I will always be here"
"To love you and dispel your fear." I finished with him, our voices in a ghostly harmony in the darkness of the room. We sounded akin to the rushing of the wind through reeds near the river, or the screech of a lone owl over the plains.
That did it. Tears flowed down my face in a steady stream and my voice cracked and disappeared. I opened the door to Gunther's room and tossed myself onto his bed. I don't know how long I was there, but that was the first, but not the last, time I realized that they were gone.
I wept on Gunther's bed until no more tears would come, nor could another sob escape.
The hardest thing I have ever done, to this day, was to leave that bed.
I knew what of his I wanted to take, but I also understood that I had a limit of what I could carry. No matter how I tried, there was no way I could take his whole quilt - the quilt I made him - with me. It pained me - almost as much as leaving it there - to cut off our favorite corner.
The square was of two horses galloping together across plains of long amber grass, which alone took me nearly two months to finish. Every tedious stitch and pricked finger was worth it when I saw the look on his face when I gave it to him for his seventeenth and last birthday.
I knew both the horses in real life; the black one was modeled after Gunth's Coal, his favorite, while my favorite was the brown one, Maethor. My brother and I sometimes used to ride together, racing each other over dunes and hillocks in the moonlight.
Finally, as the darkness began to lessen, and as a grayish-pinkish hue formed at the horizon, I shut the door to my home for the last time. It creaked slowly and sadly, as if my house knew we would probably never meet again.
I slung my bag over my shoulder, the bow and quiver of arrows I carried from the kitchen whacking my knee and thigh with each step. Turning my back on my childhood home, I took my first step towards the tall tree, now many times smaller from a distance.
Mallorn, Haldir called it.