Wind howled about the ship as the storm moved slowly on. In the room, the air had grown chill. Pio shivered and drew her grey cloak about her. She stood watching the now sleeping form of the man as he lay on her bed, beneath the thin sheet. He stirred in his dreamings, and she pulled her thick quilt up about him. ‘Let him rest for now.’ she thought to herself. ‘He has need of it.’
Moving quietly, she pulled on her breeches and boots and threw on a warm shirt to ward off the cold. She put her cloak about her once again, and drew the hood up as proof against the rain. Softly she withdrew from the room, and made no sound as she hurried down the hall and up the stairs to the deck.
Ancalimon stood there, watching the course of the storm, and she drew near to speak with him.
‘The storm grows less and moves on.’ she said. Narrowing her eyes, she bent her gaze toward the coastline, still obscured by the rain. She could make out nothing for good or ill that moved along the shore. ‘Do you have a sense of them?’ she asked, thinking about her small friends upon the sea in their fragile vessels. ‘Or of Angara?’
He shook his head ‘no’. ‘You feel it though, do you not, Piosenniel? That growing shadow that casts itself over the land and sea now. Gorthaur sits uneasy in his chambers. He searches for the source of His discomfort.
The elf pulled her cloak more tightly about her, as if to hide from that terrible, dread shadow. She shut her mind tightly against it. Her thoughts, now closely guarded, strayed to the West and the seas which led from it. She ached to call to them in warning, but she dared not.
Ancalimon put his hand upon her shoulder.
‘I, too, pray He has no sense of them. It would be dire, indeed, should we have to face him.’
They stood then, in silence, for a long while. Two grey clad figures gazing northward.
[ September 22, 2002: Message edited by: piosenniel ]
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Eldest, that’s what I am . . . I knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.
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