Asmalinde

The messenger approached the small house set upon the rolling hills of prairie south of the Misty Mountains and west of Rohan. The foundations were set deep in the earth and the walls were hewn of rough stone. The roof was made of wooden logs and straw thatch. As she drew closer up the hill she could see through the sunlight that it was burnt. Smoke marks scored the stone where the roof had touched the walls. The birds ceased their noise and the wind no longer whispered through her ears.

Running softly, Asmalinde made her way through the Old Forest and over the escarpment that led into the bowl of Tyrn Gorthad, The Barrow Downs. The barrows were the ancient cemeteries of the Northern Kingdom of Cardolan. The surface was barren and covered with knee to chest high grasses. Timeless cenotaphs jutted from the earth like staggered teeth. Starlight pierced the low lying fog and cast intricate shadows upon the boulders and old gravestones.

Asmalinde came fully awake. She had been drifting half in half out between the elven world and the earthly one. Nothing was clear to her. Flashes of a deep stairway, fire and stars blotted out by shadows. She shook her head and broke from her all but non-existent camp. She had left her horse behind in one of the small farms dotting the landscape on the edge of the Old Forest and the east road to Bree-town.

Shimmering waves of heat rose above the grasses of the Firion Wood. Mosquitos droned around her ears as Asmalinde pressed her body deeper into the crevasse in the Ered Nimrais, the White Mountains separating Rohan and Gondor. She was forty days out of Imladris: through Misty Mountains cold and the swamps of the Anduin wetlands. Asmalinde’s journey had been uneventful, at least until today.

Asmalinde sat in a chair in front of the great fireplace in the Hall of Fire in Imladris. She slouched backwards, legs stretched out as she enjoyed the warmth of the fire and the ethereal, timeless joy of the hall. Her journey from Mithlond had been swift. She had parted from the southern bank of the Gulf of Lhun twenty days before. Asmalinde journeyed through the wilderness. Tall trees and hilly crags blocked the old path travelers had abandoned.

Lightning peeled open the sky and thunder boomed across the hellish landscape. Flames from the desperate push of armies lit the night sky as smoke billowed in green and red hues. The warrior, sword and shield raised, blocked the attacks of a dozen or more iron blades that reigned down upon her. The flash of a flaming blue blade eliminated half of the orcish arms that wielded them. Side to side the elves fought as one.