Diary, I have long neglected you. The seasons turn -- without Themodir. The apples fall -- without Themodir. We might have gone picking nuts together.
And I deem Norliriel suffers nearly as much as I do, and that is bottomless agony. Again I come to the problem of having some skill fixing the hröa but not the fëa, not over some ocean of grief this deep, while I too am shipwrecked in it.
There were horse-races at the In-gathering feast. And Norlië sat Morofel. He had to go to somebody, and she cares for him -- perhaps too much. Twice they fell, in the small brooks tributary to the Bruinen. And twice they got up again, each only hide-scratched, because Themodir's destrier of war is of necessity a canny beast that will do all it can to save itself and its rider.
But Norli came, shivering and crying. And hir Parnard sent her for apples, and in that time I was able to hint at a bit of the real cause of her distress: she sees in the horse the image of his rider. She thinks that if aught happens amiss to the horse, it will be, again, as if she failed to save Themodir -- although Aurineth's bird was only recently launched, bearing our plea to the Golden Wood, that if aught grows in the Lady's garden that will stop the dreadful poison, that we must know. There is, as I write this, no antidote. She could not have saved him, though she tried -- one of four who bore him shoulder-high on a cloak, and singing to him the whole way, to remind him that he was on the way to his wedding. They ran over ice and snow for three days. If those snowy-reedy creatures Lilleduil and Tathlas are so obsessed with could gallop, perhaps they might have matched the speed of my husband's pall-bearers. She did all that could have been asked of her. O Diary, she returned him for his wedding, though it was his last moment on Arda. Yet it was his wish, and she fulfilled it. Do I not wish she, or anybody, had saved him? I do, as much as any one save perhaps Tûr Anglachelm, who knew him from boyhood. Could she have? She could not. Yet she returned Morofel to the starting point essentially unharmed (as Lilleduil, I hear, translated for her at the stables), and could not see it for her vivid memories of his master.
I knew she and I would share a destiny when we took our oaths together to serve Bar-en-Vanimar in all things. Ai, Themodir stood there so proudly! And we stated the same words, only in different tongues of the Quendi. And from then on she has been as I imagine a younger sister would be -- all but a few are younger, now.
How then, how do I rid her of the searing guilt? She has been practicing and playing music, accompanying hir Vorongwë at the feast; clearly something else is needed. The horse was bought off with a few apples. Would that I could so easily lay hands on poor Norli's snowy temples and lift away the coronet of woe. O she who gave all she had, and feels it is not enough!
