The abandoned ranger crashed through the black-shadowed forest, caring nothing for the noise he made in his fury. How could he have been so stupid as to trust her? She had tricked him with her yawning, and her quiet smile.
Just because you give someone a name doesn't mean you plan to use it he thought, mentally hitting himself over the head. Although his mind burned, Aragorn's rangers' discipline ran cold beneath as he ran. He had found her trail easily, but it was hours cold - even with the dark and her slowness, she must be several miles away by now. He picked up his speed as best he could through the dense trees and uneven ground, driven by a sense of urgency he could not explain, and did not try to.
Even though his eyes were better than most mens', he was finding it hard to follow Lora's increasingly scatty trail with her irrational detours, and he nearly lost her path where she had forced her way through a gap that he could not manage. It occurred to him now and then that she might be leading him into a trap, but his increasingly forceful instinct drove him forward.
The noises made by his progress seemed to violate the silence of the forest, and Aragorn could feel hostile awareness radiating from the newly-woken trees. Although this filled him with an even deeper unease, he forced himself to shield his mind to them, and willed them to ignore his presence in the dark, and the girl's too.
Suddenly he stopped. Lora's path ended, but she was nowhere to be seen. Momentarily confused, he looked around wildly to see if he was mistaken, but he was not, and cold seized his heart. There were no signs of a struggle. He wondered for a minute, bizarrely, if she could have disappeared as swiftly as she had appeared, or whether she had never existed at all, that his solitary mind had twisted and broken without his noticing. Then his sword was drawn and in his hand, almost before he realised he had heard a noise - perhaps it was before, for it sounded like a warped echo of the whisper of steel across leather. There was another noise directly above his head, and with a shout Aragorn thrust his sword upwards into something hard, rewarded by a furious shrieking hiss. His blade was yanked upwards, but he kept hold of the hilt, and as he tried to pull it back noticed a thick black liquid trickling down the blade, running along the grooves in the beaten steel and collecting above the hilt, before spilling over. Something made the ranger let go before the substance reached his bare hands, and he watched in horrified fascination as it ate into the leather binding the grip, bubbling and smoking as it dripped onto the floor.
The malevolent hissing redoubled, and grew in size until it filled the clearing, and Aragorn, without his sword, was filled with a dark terror. He tried to fight it and reached for his dagger, but fear crept into his mind and froze him stiff; as he fell senseless to the floor he thought he could hear a girl screaming.