Birdie sat crouched in the stern, biting her fingernails. Her seasickness seemed to have passed, but only to be replaced with a growing withdrawal and resentment from her companions. She hadn't eaten, hadn't slept, and was feeling utterly wretched.
"Listen to them all," she thought back on the night of cries, screams, weeping, and shouts of defiance. "They all think they're so wonderful, with their Elven blood. What good does it do them now? They couldn't even tell the real Cirdan from a fake, the real Legolas from a shadow."
"And they don't even want me. It's just all a mistake that I'm even here at all. Leave them to their fate. I'm getting out of here."
Birdie spread her arms and closed her eyes, trying with every fiber of her being to feel the change of morphing. But it was no good. She remained in the body she was born with. Remained on the ship.
"What am I doing? I can't leave them." A small nasty voice in her head suggested that she was not leaving everyone, she was going to go get help. "But that's silly. By the time I got back to shore, and another ship could be sent out, they might all be dead, or something even worse."
"Why am I acting this way. I haven't laughed or cracked a bad joke since I came on board this barge. What's wrong with us all?"
Birdie decided that she may as well try to do something to help them all out of this situation, she went over what the other had told her, thinking back on all the dreams and signs given to them throughout the voyage, ending with Child's declaration of seeing a vision of the Blue Wizards, and their plans for their elf captives.
And now Legolas and Cirdan are gone, could they have been the Blue Wizards in disguise? But who was piloting the ship? Or was it piloting themselves.
Birdie ran to the wheelhouse. There she found Veritas slumped in enchanted slumber, and the wheel of the vessel, seemingly unmanned. But the small cabin had an icy feeling to the air. Birdie had lived in the Downs too long not to know when someone was in a room, even if no one was in the room, if you take her meaning.
"Who is captain, here?" she whispered. Silence answered her, but the air grew thicker and colder. "What do you want from us?"
Suddenly, the vapors of the room coagulated into a form. Birdie had seen many elves in her day, but known had feeled her with the horror that this Eldar did. Tall, magnificant, splendid, but his face had a ghastly pallor far beyond the fairest of the Fair Folk, and his eyes burned unseeing with rage, shame, and longing. He gripped the wheel of the vessel with a dead man's grip, and his hair flew about his face in a wind not of this world. He was quite mad. His mouth opened, lips curling back as he shrieked one word:
"Idrillllllllll.........."
Then he was gone. But the ship sailed on.
Birdie backed out of the cabin, stumbling and screaming with no sound, she started to fly from the horrible vision, but then remembered Veritas slumped on the floor. Sucking a deep breath, she dashed back into the cabin and dragged the somnamulent elf/wizard out of the there by her heels.
"Wake up, Veritas! Wake up! We've got to find the others! I know who the Demon Lover is! The Blue Wizards have called back Maeglin!"
Then once again the horrible, mad cry came again from the wheelhouse:
"Idrilllllllllll........."
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