Disclaimer: Middle Earth and all things associated belong to J.R.R. Tolkien and his heirs – I am just playing for a while.  I promise to put my toys away when I am done.

Plans and Discoveries

Noon found Elrohir and Elladan sharing a honey-cake feast atop a large boulder, both staring out over the wide trackless plain like twin princes over their kingdom.  The boulder jutted up from the sea of bright green grass like an island in the sea.  The grass seemed to continue in one smooth carpet forever, though there were many hidden rifts and valleys throughout this portion of Anor.  The ponies, Stormy and Cloudy, grazed contentedly a short distance away.  The twins had made what they believed to be good time during the morning ride.  After a brief debate after crossing the Ford of Bruinen, they had decided to travel east for a time, since bad things usually came from the east, and ada would surely be out there somewhere fighting the bad things.  They could help, since they brought their knives. 

            "We should start planning how to get over the Misty Mountains." Elrohir commented around a mouthful of sweet bread.  He had loved the piles of maps in his ada's library, and had spent hours staring at them intently, admiring how a squiggly line could actually be a rushing river, or a jagged line be a tall mountain range.  Elladan frowned, and turned to look at the hazy shapes of the mountain range.

            "But it is so far away!  It will take us weeks and weeks to get there, why should we plan that part now?" he protested.  It seemed much more sensible to him to plan how they were going to attack the orcs they were going to find.  Elrohir shook his head in a knowledgeable fashion, much like their tutor was wont to do.

            "No, 'Dan…   I have seen the maps.  They are only this far away." Elrohir asserted, holding his fingers a careful sliver apart.  Elladan studied his twin's fingers for a while, quietly referring back to the barely-seen mountains every few moments. 

            "'Ro… how can they be that far away if I can step like this…" he rose, a bit unsteadily, and took an exaggerated step across the boulder, "and still be far away from the mountains?"  This stymied Elrohir.  The distances had looked so small on the map!  However, he could not refute his brother's argument – that step was definitely bigger than the space on the map.  In fact, if Elladan had walked that far on the map, he would be in Gondor by now.  He tried to puzzle the problem out while Elladan cautiously made his way back to his perch and flopped back down on his seat.

            "Maybe… the distances… are bigger in the real thing than on the map?"  Elrohir suggested hesitantly.  After all, the Bruinen had looked like a tiny squiggle on the map, and had been quite wide in real life, bigger than two pony lengths.  That had confused him for a bit, but he had forgotten it in the ensuing debate over where they should travel.  Elladan had won, since he knew more about quests and things like that.

            :"How much bigger?" Elladan demanded.  He had preferred books to maps, since he would rather hear the descriptions of other lands rather than look at pictures of them. 

            "I do not know… maybe a lot." Elrohir admitted quietly.  Elladan frowned angrily.

            "How will we know when we'll get there then?  We could take weeks, and ada and naneth will wonder what is taking us so long!" he cried.  This sudden, and very loud, outburst startled the two ponies, which bolted a few steps before deciding that the twins were not about to attack them.  Elladan and Elrohir were too engrossed in their argument to pay attention to their straying mounts. 

            "No they will not, because they have been out of the valley before, and know how far it is to different places!" Elrohir argued hotly, determined to prove he was not causing this quest to fail.

            "But what if they have not been to the place they are now?  Then they would not know." Elladan pointed out, with a bit of a superior air.  "We will be late, and I'll tell them 'We would be here sooner ada and naneth, but 'Ro did not know how far we had to go, and we were lost.'" He crowed.

            "We will not get lost, you orc!" Elrohir shouted, startling the ponies further. Both elflings rose to their feet, facing each other, and paid no mind to the ponies, which were wandering farther and farther away.

            "You're the orc!  You just don't want to be wrong!" Elladan shouted back, sensing triumph.

            "I am not wrong!  We will just have to go farther than on the map!  Just because I do not know how far does not mean I'm wrong, stupid orc!"

            "Not an orc!" Elladan howled, and pounced on his brother.  The flying tackle knocked both elflings off the boulder and into the grass, where they wrestled furiously.  The noise and confusion frightened the two ponies further, and since they were sensible beasts, they bolted back towards the safety of their stalls… back in Imladris.  Neither elfling noticed the ponies' departure.  The wrestling degenerated into a mud-slinging contest.  There was no lack of ammo, since the melting snows that made this land green had also provided plenty of mud.  The shadows lengthened as the afternoon wore on, and eventually two mud-covered elflings stretched out on the sun-warmed boulder.

            "So we have a long way to go yet?" Elladan asked sleepily, moving only his head to look over at his twin.  Playing in the mud was tiring work.

            "Yes.  But with Stormy and Cloudy it should not take too long." Elrohir assured his twin.  Elladan nodded in agreement.  Neither twin bothered to check on the ponies, since in the stories the hero's noble steed never wandered away.  It never occurred to the twins that the reason for this was the hero, a trained warrior, knew enough to tether his horse during breaks.  While many well-trained elvish mounts could be trusted to stay put without the need for a tether, the twins' ponies were young yet, and full of the willfulness of their kind. 

            "'Ro?"  Elladan's sleepy voice broke the lazy afternoon silence.

            "Yes 'Dan?" Elrohir sounded equally weary.

            "I miss naneth and ada." Elladan admitted mournfully

            "I miss them too, 'Dan." Elrohir concurred, but Elladan did not hear him.  A soft snore was the only answer he received.  With a sigh, he curled up on the warmed stone and fell asleep next to his twin.

            Glorfindel was in a fine rage by the time he and his small mounted scouting party reached the edges of Imladris valley.  He had personally searched all of the twins' favorite hiding spots, and came up empty.  The longer he searched, the stronger the nagging feeling at the back of his mind became.  He was already half-convinced that the twins had somehow managed to escape the valley's bounds.  If that was true… he only hoped Elrond would stay unconscious long enough for the search to come to a successful conclusion.  Somehow, he did not think he had hit the half-elf quite that hard.  As the small band neared the edge of the forest, a tall slim figure leapt down from an overhead perch.

              "Hirtirun, any word?" Glorfindel called, unconsciously repeating Elrond's comment from earlier as he pulled Asfaloth to a stop.  Luckily for both Glorfindel's and Hirtirun's pride, neither recognized the veiled insult in their shared anxiety over the missing twins.

            "None.  If they came this way, they should be teaching us lessons in stealth, for neither I nor my companions have seen them." He asserted confidently.  Of course, they had a wide area to patrol, but they had been doing so for centuries.  He was less confident when he noted his commander was no longer paying attention to him.  Glorfindel was staring intently at the ground.  After a moment, he slipped off the faithful Asfaloth, kneeling to get a better look at the mark that had caught his attention.  It was the imprint of a horse's hoof… but it was very small, and there was a strange irregular patch on the outside edge… his memory flashed back to the day the twins' ponies had been shod.  The twins had been taken with the idea of marking things as theirs at the time, and had begged the stable master to somehow mark the shoes so everyone would know that they had ponies.  The stable master had obliged, chipping out a small section on the outside edge of the shoes that would go on the hind hooves…

            "Valar protect them." He breathed, stunned.  "And me as well, while they are at it."