It had driven Aiedale to distraction that she had been continually bested by Lucian. Of course she had only been learning the knives for a scant four years and he had two more on top of that of training and then actual field experience. And of course he had the advantage in weight and height, so it was hardly a fair fight even if she had been a good foot taller and twenty pounds heavier. But it frustrated her even more when one of the Clave attended and observed their fights. Lucian was the pride of the Paris Institute and then Alicante's training program - the training program that Aiedale's aunt had refused to allow her to attend despite Aiedale's clear candiacy for the program and her desire to excell. Lucian rarely made a mistake, his form was perfect and Aiedale was merely used to highlight his perfection…his sportsmanship, his ability to teach even as he defeated her again and again.
Defeated. Her!
She remembered burning with jealously at the attention he'd received every time to. She remembered how she'd felt it was so unfair, how she had thought him a fool and fraud. But Aiedale did not linger in those feelings, she turned them to her advantage, let them push her and her training forward. She refused to be told that she was somehow inferior because she had been educated in Paris and not allowed to attend the training program in Alicante.
Eventually the finesse and the speed came. Endless practice and ruthless determination gave her muscle memories so ingrained that they provided all of the flow with none of the lag of conscious thought.
And still she watched Lucian and she wondered what darkness coiled behind that perfect facade.
She did not trust him.
There was no mark upon the ground the next morning to signal that they had been visited by what had seemed to be an old man. Gimli was especially concerned and not reassured in the slightest when Legolas pointed out that even a heavy boot would leave no print here because of the deep, springy turf.
"It was a phantom," growled the dwarf, his hands shifting uneasily along the shaft of his ax. "Some evil thing created by Saruman…his eyes are looking out on us from Fangorn even now."
"Maybe," said Aiedale, her eyes shifting to the trees, searching the shadows between the trunks for the millionth time. "Maybe it was him last night and I think we are being watched right now, but I don't think it is Saruman. I know what his gaze felt like from a few days ago…this isn't him."
"That is little comfort," said the dwarf.
The Shadowhunter stamped a foot impatiently, "We should go. We have wasted enough time."
She would have preferred to be already gone, to forgo even a small breakfast in favour of searching for the hobbits. With each passing moment she grew more and more impatient, practically vibrating with her need to move, to hunt. The looming shadowy trees and the secrets they concealed, the dangers that lurked there was a challenge and she found herself rising to meet it.
There was a sense of something building. Something coming closer, a pressure that hovered and built with each passing moment, a distant tremor like the rolling of distant thunder. A fuse that was running out -
The Shadowhunter shiverred, hand clenching around the hilt of one of her knives.
Aiedale had felt this the last time as the Fellowship floated down the Anduin. It had disquieted her then and it did so now.
She didn't know how she would fair against a full-powered wizard allied with evil overlords like Sauron and she didn't care to find out. What Aiedale did know - and she preferred to stick with that - was how she faired against orcs in Moria and then those strange orc-hybrids.
But Aragorn was not moving, he was staring at the place where the horses had been picketed. "The horses, Gimli, Aiedale, last night…they were scared away?"
Aiedale forced herself to take a breath, to pause, "They snapped their tethers."
And that is not the only thing about to snap, she snarled to herself.
"They were not afraid," said Legolas, "I heard them quite clearly. But for the darkness and our own fear I would have said they were meeting some old friend."
"So I thought," said the Ranger with one last look to the hoof prints on the turf. "Come, let us look at the print that Aiedale found. If the hobbits escaped by some chance, then they must have hidden in the trees, or they would have been seen. If we find nothing more than we will make a last search upon the battle-field and among the ashes. But there is little hope there: the horsemen of Rohan did their work too well."
The print was still there, the faint impression on the very edge of the wood between two roots. Aiedale studied it and the surrounding ground for a long moment, but it was Legolas who found the next clues as to the fates of their hobbit companions: a golden Mallorn leaf now fading and turning brown with small crumbs of lembas and a piece of roughly cut cord.
"And here is the knife that cut them," said Gimli. He drew out of a tussock a short jagged blade. The haft from which it had been snapped was beside it. "An orc weapon," said the dwarf with disgust and he went to throw it away.
Aiedale stopped him, however, taking it from his hands and examining it even as the dwarf told her to leave it. The blade had been shaped like a hideous head with squinting eyes and leering mouth. She glanced around and said quietly, slowly, "What if the hobbits - or at least one of them - were out in the open…but they were hidden under the elven-cloak."
"My thoughts exactly," said the Ranger who was three steps ahead of the Shadowhunter in piecing together the events that occurred here. Aragorn pointed at the ground, "Look."
There were more footprints further away and these ones suggested that there had been two hobbits and that they had been moving with some haste into the trees. The earth might have been bare and dry so close to the forest, revealing little, but it was enough to excite the Ranger and that was quite enough for the Shadowhunter. She had come to trust her companion's tracking skills without question, if he said the hobbits had tread this path and that it was definitely two hobbits, then she would believe him.
How strange, whispered a voice in her mind, once upon a time you held a knife to his throat to protect those very same hobbits.
She glanced down at the orc knife she still held and debated what to do with it. Take it with her? It was a knife with a lethally sharp edge despite the crudeness of the shape and weight. She was always conscious of her limited selection of weapons. At the rate their little group was going who knew what was waiting for them in Fangorn.
No, she decided, it was too crude, too ugly for her. A thought occurred to her…a thought that made her smile with a grim kind of humour. With a swift flick of her arm that rotated her wrist just so she sent it flying with deadly accuracy towards the orc head impaled by the Rider's of Rohan on a broken spear some distance away. She smirked as it hit the mark exactly: two inches below the grotesquely distorted head. The force of the throw split the spear, sending the head and the splintered wood backwards into the ashy remnants of the fire.
Even Shadowhunters had to make a point to themselves once in a while about just how good their aim was.
Turning away from the ashy, charred funeral pyre, she made to enter the forest proper, but her companions had paused again. Gimli especially seemed uneasy and it was Legolas, surprisingly, who reassured him.
"This wood is not evil," said the Wood elf. He stepped up to stand by Aiedale, leaning forward and peering with wide, far seeing blue eyes into the shadows. "I know evil. I know how it twists and taints the heart of trees. This is not evil; or what evil is in it is far away. There are only faint echoes of dark places where the hearts of the trees are black. There is only watchfulness and anger."
"Let us go," said Aiedale, her words snapping with tension, the tone making her companions start slightly. "We should not delay any longer."
They plunged forward. Aragorn leading them, following the Entwash where the hobbits footprints were clearer. Aged trees of huge dimensions, whose ponderous arms were clad with grey moss and ferns far out to their points; tough, gnarled, leafless creepers growing from one root. The forest felt like one of the first mysteries of Middle Earth's nature, the dense foliage overhead blocking out all but the occasional beam of sunlight. The air was mossy and damp, earthy.
Aiedale followed behind, content for now to walk beside the light-footed elf with Gimli behind, his ax held loosely in his hands. It was automatic, it was a pattern that had been established. Ranger then Elf Prince then Aiedale and then Dwarf Lord, all of them working together, keeping track of each other.
When had she grown comfortable with this? When had this order become the norm?
She didn't know. She also didn't know what had possessed her the previous night when she had spoken so frankly with the elf Prince about the seraph blade and the Balrog.
What was she doing?
She knew there was a cost. A person could not just do what she was doing and not expect to pay something for it. As far back as she could remember, growing up under the Clave's ruthless guidance, she had known there was a consequence to any and every action she took. A price to be paid. And the cost wasn't necessarily paid by her. All in her life, even her younger brother, had all taken the heat for her decisions, for her mistakes.
She wondered now what she would do if she was to drop back into her world. What it would be like to dress in Gear and surround herself with the trappings of her old life, pick up that mindset, and view any and everything in terms of the possible threat it posed.
She missed that. She missed not having to take responsibility for her decisions, missed in some ways the Clave's iron control. The very thing she had pushed and fought against, resisted and challenged was also the very thing that had given her a sense of security. It had been the structure by which she built her life, the structure in which she operated and thought. It had been the means by which she justified her actions, justified the things she told herself she had to do no matter how ruthless or soul-destroying they were.
There was none of that security in this dimension. It had been her decision to go with Frodo, her decision to stand with Gandalf and fight the Balrog. It had been her who pushed Frodo and Sam's little boat away into the swift-moving river and she alone who had come to late to save Boromir when there was still a chance of saving him.
But who would pay the price?
Boromir had, she thought. It hurt thinking about him and his struggle against the Ring, his valiant effort to atone for his mistake.
Aiedale skirted a tree, climbing over and around a thick snarl of roots. Her hands resting briefly on the dark, moss-covered wood of the tree. She tripped. Again. She craned her neck to glare up at the tree which she was sure had done that on purpose.
The tree rustled. That damn root which she had tripped overlooked smug. She cast her eyes about, her irritation at her apparent clumsiness in woods fading into unease, knowing she was being watched but unable to determine by what. There were so many potential hiding spots, so many ways to move unseen through the heavy canopy and thick, curling shadows. They could be watched on all sides and she wouldn't know unless their watcher showed themselves.
There isn't any wind, she suddenly realized as she brushed a lock of her increasingly manky hair out of her face. While the trees didn't move, Aiedale had the inexplicable feeling that they were closing in, reaching for her and her three companions with long, thin, brittle branches.
She tripped.
Again.
Finally, coming to a stony hill, the companions climbed and found themselves standing on some sort of rough rock-wall with steps leading to a higher shelf. Beams of sunlight were striking through the clouds. The forest stretched out around them, the trees still and silent. There was no sign of the hobbits.
It was then, as they paused in that open space, that both Legolas and Aiedale saw the shape of the man from the previous night moving swiftly through the trees. He had a long staff in one hand and his head was bowed. Saurman? Some shade or creature that took the form of a man?
The Shadowhunter froze.
There was that feeling again…that feeling of events coming to a head, of some fuse being lit. Only it was more defined -
She barely heard the warning Legolas hissed to their companions. She barely saw the approaching figure, cloaked and hooded. She was lost in that sense that had haunted her for weeks. The sense that had kept her nerves strung out, kept her searching and hunting even as she was stymied again and again as to what it was referring to. But it was more defined; more potent and it made her reluctant to act before she had a better idea of who…or what approached. When would the wave that had been building finally crest; a heavy, static stillness before a storm breaks…
Her hand closed around a knife, her feet moving so that she was angled - a smaller target - but she did not throw the knife, she did not reach for her bow. She waited, she watched. Let her be underestimated, let this potential adversary show their cards before she showed hers.
Which was why she still had her knife when the man decided to become a blinding white sun in response to Aragorn's challenging question of who are you and Gimli's cry of Saurman. Her companions lost their weapons - Gimli dropped his ax with a cry, Legolas missed his target by a good two feet as his bow shot went wild and Aragorn didn't even get to draw his sword. The man was suddenly towering above them, grey rags flung away to reveal shining white garments that could have been an advertisement for the powers of bleach.
Aiedale waited, muscles tensed, until the blinding light had faded, burying her face in her arm, eyes streaming and stinging. She lifted her head, squinting at the figure that was beginning to appear through the sun spots that danced across her enhanced vision -
No.
No.
It couldn't be. As her eyes cleared, as she lowered her raised arm, Aiedale saw a face that was far too familiar to another face. The same wrinkles, the same age spot under his left eye and the same bushy eyebrows. It was just he had sleek mane of snow-white hair instead of the unruly iron grey she recalled.
A dead man-
A dead wizard -
"You?!"
She threw the knife.
It speared the hat perfectly, pinning it to the tree behind the wizard.
The faint jump, the widening of those eyes was so worth it.
Aiedale, eyes flashing, was glaring at the wizard.
"Weeks," she snarled at him, "you have been gone - dead, damn it - for WEEKS."
"I strove with the Dark Tower," said the wizard, eyebrows coming down at this unexpected barrage, "and I have fought with the Shadow-"
"We ran across half this bloody world," she fired back, fury making her words crack. "We fought, we lost, we killed, we were nearly trampled by a bunch of Rohirrm-"
"I know it has been difficult…"
"Difficult?!"
"Please calm down," said the wizard in a vain attempt to placate the warrior.
"I don't want to be calm," said the Shadowhunter in a voice made dangerous by how soft it went, by the clench of her hands. "I have earned the right to be upset with your sense of timing, wizard. I have earned the right to be irritated." Her teeth snapped, "Prove you are not an enemy. Prove it."
Out of the four gathered in front of him, Aragorn a fierce warrior, Gimli with his sharp ax and Legolas of Greenwood, a seasoned veteran and an excellent bowman, it was the young woman who gave the wizard the most pause. What was she capable of? What would she do if she felt she had no other choice? She was pure reaction, perfectly timed ruthless force that could turn in a single moment.
"You," said the wizard very carefully, "are Aiedale Darklighter, daughter of Elissa Darklighter. You took your mother's surname, I believe, not your father's. And," he raised his hands in a show of peace, "you swore by the Angel to protect Frodo Baggins on his quest to destroy the Ring at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell many months ago because I asked you to."
Aiedale regarded him for a long, tense moment. She studied him so intently and for so long that the wizard wondered if she was still contemplating the best way to pin him to the tree behind him with one of her deadly sharp knives. Then again, realized the wizard, that was probably what she thought anyhow be he friend or not.
But then she nodded and backed down.
The entire clearing seemed to breathe again.
"Mithrandir," said Legolas, a look of wonder crossing his face. "How can it be?"
Aragorn was shaking his head both at his Shadowhunter companion and the wizard, looking a little frustrated with the pair of them, "Beyond all hope you return to us…"
"Gandalf," said the wizard with a shake of his head as if recalling an old memory. "I was Gandalf once."
"Once?" snapped Aiedale, "Are you sure that you…"
The wizard raised a forestalling hand and stepped down, picking up the grey cloak and wrapping it about himself so that he no longer gleamed so brightly. "I am still Gandalf," he said. "We meet again here. At the turn of the tide. The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned."
Aiedale raised one eyebrow, desperately wanting to snark something back. But she caught herself, forced herself to take a deep breath.
The wizard laid his hand on Gimli's head, and the hearty companion looked up and laughed suddenly, a deep laugh like the rolling of many stones. "Gandalf!" he said. "But you are all in white!"
"Yes, I am white now," said Gandalf. "Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been. But come now, tell me of yourselves! I have passed through fire and deep water, since we parted. I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten. I can see many things far off, but many things that are close at hand I cannot see. Tell me of yourselves!"
Aiedale dearly wanted to say that white was the colour of mourning and if the wizard really had wanted to come back and do something he should be in black. Because black was the colour of fighting gear, black was what Shadowhunters donned when they went to fight. There were all sorts of layered meanings in the choice of black, so much contained in that simple choice of colour for Gear. White was not the colour of war, not the colour of warriors who pushed themselves to the brink in a never-ending fight against darkness. But again, she restrained herself, deciding it would be infinitely more fun to draw out her snarky comments over an extended period of time.
"What do you wish to know?" said Aragorn. "All that has happened since we parted on the bridge would be a long tale. Will you not first give us news of the hobbits? Did you find them, and are they safe?"
"No, I did not find them," said Gandalf. "I do know, however, that the Ring now has passed beyond my help, or the help of any of the Company that set out from Rivendell. Very nearly it was revealed to the Enemy, but it escaped. I had some part in that: for I sat in a high place, and I strove with the Dark Tower; and the Shadow passed. Then I was weary, very weary; and I walked long in dark thought."
The wizard turned and pulled Aiedale's knife and his hat from the thick trunk of the tree. The wizard silently passed the blade back to Aiedale who took it equally silently, slipping it back into it's sheath under her quiver.
"Then you know about Frodo!" said Gimli, leaning forward on his ax. "How do things go with him?"
Aiedale stiffened slightly, her keen gaze fixing on the wizard. Frodo and Sam…she thought often of them.
"I cannot say. He was saved from a great peril, but many lie before him still."
"Sam went," said the warrior coldly. "They had resolved to go on. They will."
She remembered all too well standing there with Sam on the edge of the river and then refusing the Ring when Frodo offered it to her. It was imprinted in her mind with perfect, razor sharp clarity.
The wizard glanced at the warrior quickly and said, "That is news to me and it is good news. It eases my heart."
"Merry and Pippen," said Aiedale, "do you know where they are?"
"Ah," said the wizard with a gleam in his eye, "their coming was like falling of small stones that starts an avalanche. Fangorn is waking up. Fangorn is finding that it is strong. The hobbits escaped great peril at the hands of the Mordor and Isengard orcs and have come to this forest at the right time…I should not want to be Saruman."
Aiedale stepped in front of the wizard, her voice the cold, calm voice of a commander asking for further clarification from a junior officer, "Where are they?"
"With an old friend and a guardian of this forest," said the wizard placatingly. "Treebeard is an Ent and a very reliable-"
"An Ent?!" snapped the Shadowhunter, all patience momentarily lost.
"Treebeard is Fangorn, the Guardian of the Forest; he is the oldest of the Ents, the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-Earth."
"An Ent!" said Legolas with a wondering look. "My people have sung of the Ents but I did not think..."
"To be clear," said Aiedale as she drew on one of the long-winded explanations of Middle Earth's various inhabitants that she had read in Imladris, "Merry and Pippen are with a tree?! A talking, walking tree?!"
"Well yes," said the wizard. "But there is much to speak of-"
Aiedale was ready to argue, ready to tell the wizard exactly what she thought of him and his so-called wisdom when Aragorn rested a firm hand on her shoulder. "We have gone through many trials," said the Ranger pointedly, "but we are allies and friends."
The Shadowhunter fumed silently as the conversation moved on. Aragorn wanted to know what Gandalf knew about Saurman and the Ring. Legolas wanted to know about the thing that he and Aiedale had shot at over Sarn Gebir which, to the Shadowhunter's annoyance, turned out to be one of the Nazgul who now rode winged, dragon-like steeds. The same kind of creature that she had struck down before the Company had reached the Carahdras so many months before. One mystery solved, the Shadowhunter had thought.
Finally, the wizard said, "We must go quickly, friends. I have spoken words of hope but only of hope. And hope is not victory. War is upon us and our allies, a war which we have little hope of winning. I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still."
"Was it you, last night?" asked Aiedale at last.
"No," said the wizard. "That would have been Saurman…at least that explains your desire to make an incurable hole in my hat."
"I have many reasons for that," said Aiedale coldly, one hand fingering the knife she had retreived. "Starting with your resemblance to Surman and ending with your common sense."
The Ranger stepped between them again and said, "Will we see the hobbits again?"
"Perhaps," said the wizard. "Who knows? Go where you must and hope! To Edoras!"
"That is a long way for a man to walk," said the Ranger quietly but with a certain amount of frustration. "And battle will come there before we reach it."
"We shall see, we shall see," said the wizard and there was a twinkle in those eyes that made the Shadowhunter instantly suspicious. "Will you come with me now?"
"Yes," said Aragorn. He looked long and hard at the wizard. Aiedale and the others watched them in silence as they stood there facing one another. The grey figure of the Ranger, Aragorn son of Arathorn, stern and his hand upon the hilt of his sword; a king out of the mists of the sea, a remnant of some distant age of kings. The old wizard before him, white; shining as if there was some light inside of him, holding a power that was greater than the strength of kings.
"Let us go," said the wizard, "you are all needed. The light of Anduril must be uncovered. There is war in Rohan and worse evil. Will you all join in this final adventure?"
"Yes," agreed Legolas and Gimli nodded stoutly.
"And you, Aiedale?" asked the wizard, eyes growing keen once more as they came to rest on the Shadowhunter. "Will you once again throw your lot with ours?"
Aiedale stood for a long minute, thinking, aware that this was another moment where she could make a choice. It was like when she had first met the hobbits or when she had made that decision in the Council Room in Rivendell. That same sense of a path forking before her and knowing, regardless of what common sense or Shadowhunter logic told her, that she had to say yes.
"Oui," said the Shadowhunter.
So much was contained in that acceptance, in that signal of commitment. Even the Shadowhunter did not fully understand why she had come so far, why she was willing to keep going like this. All she knew was she could stay like this and if there were answers then they lay further down this endless road. She would have liked to say that she had planned this, that she had seen all this coming and that such minor events as landing in another dimension or the rise of an evil over-lord called Sauron weren't out of the ordinary. But that wouldn't have been the truth.
The wizard studied her for a long moment and said, his words half directed at Aragorn and Legolas, "One day I will have to hear how it was that you were delivered from the darkness of Moria."
"Likewise," said Aiedale and there was a definite snap to her voice.
"You fell?" The wizard's eyes snapped back to Aiedale, his voice sharp.
"For a time," said the Shadowhunter. "But then I ended up navigating my way through Khazad-dum and out the same Gate as the rest of the Fellowship."
She did not elaborate on that endless maze of tunnels or the orcs she had encountered there. She did not tell the wizard that she had woken up on a narrow crevice, alone and broken with little hope but a great deal of gratitude for whatever power had saved her. There were some things she did not want to explain and the ins and outs of how she had survived Moria were one of those things. She'd already told the people that needed to know.
"You?" she inquired.
"I have been sent back until my task is done," said the wizard. "I fought my enemy on the pinnacle of the Silvertine, in Durin's Tower carved in the living rock of Zirak-zigil. When I threw down my enemy and he fell and broke the mountain side there darkness took me; and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far." The wizard looked distant, his voice falling, "At last I came back. Gwaihir the Windward found me again and he took me up and bore me to Caras Galadhon. But you were lately gone and so I stayed there for a time, healing and I was clothed in white."
"I see," said the Shadowhunter but she did not entirely see. She did not fully understand what the wizard meant by it or how it was that he could come back.
It was then that they began to walk, descending quickly from the high shelf and back into the forest. Fangorn was less dreary now that they walked with the White Wizard.
It brought to mind the woods close to the Darklighter manor house in Idris for the Shadowhunter. Thinking of those woods took her thoughts, however unwillingly, to her little brother.
I miss you, she thought, a rare allowance to herself to think of James who had been one of the few constants in her life. Had he been there he no doubt would have had some wise crack for her, some joke about a dusty tome he was researching in the extensive library on one of the Clave's endless hunt for information on all things demons. He would have asked her where all these doubts had sprung from.
We walk different paths, she might have told him. She might have told him they had walked very different paths for a long time.
And he might have told her that it didn't matter what path a person walked as long as one kept good company.
She felt a faint smile tug at her lips. Her brother was stable where was she was erratic, predictable where she was unpredictable, easy going where she was wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. He'd been the steady one and she had been the one constantly pushing, constantly stepping further.
Neither of them trusted easily. They had both grown up in the same pressure-keg of constant demands for excellence, devotion, and duty. It had been woven into their identities, threaded and knotted through their sense of self-worth. It had come between them sometimes, neither unable to forget that they were competing for the same small shreds of approval from their superiors and the same glory for the Darklighter name. But it had also pulled them together, united them - sister and brother against the world.
Aiedale knew that her brother had a very different coping mechanism than she did. Where she found herself constantly rising to the challenge, pushing and fighting for each iota of respect given, he never lost that sense of inner self, never lost himself in the relentless drive to succeed. He was able to step back, able to put distance between himself and the reality of their lives. Aiedale had always envied that distance, that sense of calm. She had envied the way he made things simple, seemed to be content with where he was, not needing to push and challenge every moment.
I miss you, she allowed one more time. I miss you and I hope you are alright. I hope you've been okay.
She could almost hear him saying he was fine and that she shouldn't worry about him. Because that James, he was always okay. She could picture that look of his, that raising of one eyebrow as he examined her over a thick book and told her to calm down, to relax. Right now, a dimension away from him, that would have to be enough.
She would have to believe he was alright.
Because the trouble was, whether she was a Shadowhunter in her own dimenson or not, she was still Aiedale Darklighter. And no matter how far she went, how far she strayed from the straight and narrow set down by the Clave, in the end that always caught up with her.
Aiedale did not trust Lucian but she felt more comfortable with him in some ways - or at the very least understood him better, havign met so many other ambitious and committed career climbers. She wondered sometimes how he saw the rest of the Clave, the rest of the world when he noticed them at all; if they all looked like stepping stones that he could use in his climb to the top.
"You should salute me," said Lucian, caught up in playing the game. The new badge on his Gear glinting in the morning light streaming through the windows that lined one side of the corridor.
Aiedale raised an eyebrow in a brief, sideward glance of dry amusement and complete disinterest.
"I don't think so," she said.
"We make a good team when we actually work together." Lucian and Aiedale were walking down one of the plush corridors of the Paris Institue, both of them dressed in Gear. The black of their clothes, the gleaming steel of their weapons at odds with the gilded ceiling coffers and soft, muted colours of the velvet drapes that hung elegantly around the large, expansive windows.
"Really," said Aiedale without turning to look at him. "Oh wait...you mean instead of trying to get me in deep with the Clave..."
Lucian didn't even dain to justify his actions. "Still a good team, Darklighter."
"You provided them with a list of my every perceived failing and lapse this past year…I have to admit it does make you ideal for the intelligence field."
Lucian barely broke his long, effortless stride as they moved through the carpeted corridors of the Paris Institute. "Let me guess, Eleanor trying to score some points?"
"No," said Aiedale, "my aunt informed me."
That had been a…painful conversation to put it lightly. Somehow words and the disapproval they contained were worse than any knife wound and Aiedale's aunt had made sure her words stung.
"You lack ambition - didn't I tell you that?" The other Shadowhunter flicked his fingers in her direction, "Your problem is that you actually don't care about all the opportunities…it's wasted on you and believe me, that is a tragic thing to waste. Such a name you have, Darklighter, yet you waste it."
"It is not your problem."
"Yes," said her opponent, "it is." Lucian cast her a considering look, "I have a soft spot for you, Darklighter."
"Not interested," she said immediately knowing exactly where this was going and feeling the anger beginning to rise within her.
"Work with me."
"No," she said again, coming to a stop. "I am not going to fuel your power trip, Lucian. I am no toy for you to play with. Look somewhere else."
"You should stick with me," he said persuasively, "I only ask you to be what you already are….and don't start claiming ethics now, it really doesn't suit you."
Aiedale stopped moving, felt a cold smile cross her face and leaned in close, "I don't think so."
She turned and walked away.
The wizard contemplated the back of the Shadowhunter in front of him.
She was small, fine-boned but she still somehow managed to project a powerhouse of capability. Nazgul, cave trolls, wargs, orgs, a Balrog - foulest of all dark creatures - and companions who would much rather she had never come along at all...nothing had made her flinch, he reflected. It was she who had fought her way out of the chasm while he tumbled into the nothingness of fire and shadow. But something had tested that self-confidence, had shaken what had seem an unshakeable will.
His wizard hat was looking distinctly worse for wear.
He huffed, slightly annoyed.
"I am glad to see you stayed," he said casually. "We need you."
"I know," said the Shadowhunter with a thinly veiled edge to her precise voice.
The wizard knew, however, much lay in what was not said by the Shadowhunter. Actions spoke louder than any word in her world. He could count on one hand the number of times she had spoken with any genuine feeling but her actions? There lay the truth - her true worth and character even when she hadn't seem to understand the significance of her actions.
She could have thrown that knife two inches lower. She could have taken the Ring. So many times before Aiedale Darklighter could have and didn't.
"What is coming, Aiedale? What do you see in the shadows?"
She turned her head back briefly, her eyes widening fractionally at the question before her expression became guarded. "I think you know more about that than I do," she said levelly.
"And I think you sense more than you let on," he said. "Something has made you more uneasy then usually, Nephilim. I've come to trust your instincts."
She turned to look at him, her face holding that odd mixture of youth and experience. There was too much brooding grimness on that face for her to ever look her age. "I am beginning to see the larger game," she said evenly, "and it was not as I had thought."
The wizard frowned, "In what way?"
But she said nothing more, shaking her head and looking away.
The wizard mulled on her words. Elissa had been far easier to speak to, had offered information and stories with ease and quicksilver wit. She had been sly and confident.
Her daughter, however, was none of that. She was unwavering commitment, a control over thought and action as icy as a winter's day. A core of ability pressed deep, past any fear or emotional attachment. He wondered what sequences of events had put the ice in her veins and the snap in her voice. At only eighteen she seemed to lack any sort of fear for any outward threat and she remained stubbornly unafraid of things that were terrifying to others.
He prodded her consciousness but found nothing, her entire being wrapped so tightly as to be near-impenetrable, a shimmer of shadow on the edge of his awareness. There was very little there to be read even if he looked carefully and what little could be gleaned was superficial. He knew she was uneasy, knew that she hadn't expected him to be alive but he did not know what was the deeper uncertainty that troubled her…the whispers of the Ring? Had Sauron's darkness found some perches in the Shadowhunter's battered, shadowed soul? Or was it what he had always sensed within her, something that was hidden and raw, but buried so deeply behind those shields he could get no sense of it?
He glanced once more at light green eyes framed by dirty, lank curls of dark auburn hair that looked almost black in the mottled shadows of the ancient forest. She was filthier than he had ever seen the normally immaculate warrior. But her eyes were clear. They were as cold as the northern seaboard, everything locked down beneath their frozen depths but there was no hint of Sauron. The white wizard turned to look forward once more, leading the shards of the Fellowship on. He was left with a sense of something deep, something profound.
An innocence not quite lost.
A flame not quite smothered by shadow.