we interrupt this message to apologize for weird formatting, lacking spaces between paragraphs...
​I left this on inkitt and fanfiction.net for eons, and both have some editing challenges...

This tale was written somewhere in The First Age, when the films came out.

I had read LOTR in 1978. I had borrowed a shipload of X-Men comics from a friend not long after that, so both the blond blue eyed Elf and the blue blond eyed one show up here.

Though I played with the notion (and fandom debate) over the actual color of Legolas' hair, because while we know much about him from LOTR, we don't know that.

This began as my answer to all the film fangirls who had never read the books. Of course, by then, I had my own world of the ELF and Hawk Circle Farm... and they refused to be left out! So, mostly this is original fic, with a couple characters ripp... I mean, commandeered, it's a nautical term, from their own universes.

Hawk Circle has changed a little over the decades. While most of the main characters are mentioned, Bran is the Gatesinger, and about 3,000 years old (having tasted death twice, and been sent back)(blame it on the Morrigan and some ddragons, the tale is in sElf Serve as "Skyfire").

Jon was born in North America, east coast, and is about 400 years old and sucks with a sword and has no idea how to sing gates open. He shows up in Leyover, in sElf Serve. Some of his kin had sealed themselves off in a sidhe, which he and MarshHawk inadvertently break open and bring into the regular world.

Zan is somewhat older, a young teen in Black Horses and the as yet unpublished Merrow's Cap. He does grow up, I have action figures of him in several scales and ages (I customize them). 

Tas is also Sidhe, like Jon, and about the same age, having fled Europe to the Americas before real colonization took hold. While Jon's kin have hung out with east coast Native peoples, Tas knew the Plains people well. There's a mustang story about how her love was killed and she turned into a horse for a century or so, then was adopted (as a horse) by a teen girl, found by Bran, and adventure ensues.

Earla (Doc's daughter) can fix anything with fence wire and duct tape. She is mentioned here, but has more to say in other tales. I have action figures.

Na Annun Hae (to the west, away)
min: Legolas
The grey ship tossed like a restless horse under a tight rein, her bowsprit, carved like the outstretched neck of a tundra swan, reached for a shore no-one under her vast clouds of canvas had ever seen. Her bow knifed through great grey waves as she beat into the wind, fountains of seawater rising on each side of her reaching swan neck. A lone figure straddled that neck, one hand laid casually on a stay, an array of pale jibs above him catching the wind, like the primary flight feathers of a swan wing.
"What do you see? As if even an Elf could see anything in this soup."
The Elf turned, his waterfall of dark hair flying with the heave and roll of the ship and the wail of the wind, his eyes bright silver-grey as the leaping waves and the silver sky. Behind him, square in the center of the deck, his mine-dark eyes firmly fixed on where the far ...and quite motionless... horizon should be, sat a Dwarf. Sat was not entirely an adequate word. He was wedged against an Elvish deck construction built for the convenience of the ship's geese, like a badger in a hole. One of the geese was complaining in loud strident tones about the intrusion.
"Are we there yet?" The Dwarf muttered at the Elf.
The Elf laughed, "No, mellon, it will be many days yet."
"Days? Days! I thought this was the straight way."
"It is, old friend. Did not the ginger help?"
"Yes, my stomach no longer feels like ten thousand orcs rampaging."
"Good."
"Merely five thousand."
The Elf swung a leg over the swan neck of the bowsprit, he rose and ran along it as easily as he had once run across a rope strung over a wild stream on the borders of Lothlorien a lifetime ago. He leapt lightly down to the foredeck, silenced the goose with a gentle hand and a few words and sat beside the grey-bearded Dwarf. Behind them the foremast rose into silver sky, and deck and mainmast and mizzenmast vanished abaft into grey mist. The Dwarf could hear the light sounds of the rest of the Elvish crew going about their daily chores; aloft in the maze of standing and running rigging among the clouds of white cloth; on deck navigating, caring for the small zoo that had been brought along from Ithilien, cleaning, fixing, singing, braiding strange things out of rope (what was that huge fuzzy thing for anyway?). Most of them were kin of the Prince of Mirkwood, they had followed him to Ithilien and helped heal it after the War of the Ring. Now they were following him on their last great adventure, seeking the way to the Uttermost West. Sailing off the edge of the map to Eressea, to Elvenhome, where the leaves fall not, land of their people forever.
"Perhaps a tale to take your mind off the weather and wind. Or have you tired of Elvish tales and song already?" Legolas said.
A smile made its way through Gimli's thick braided beard. "No, not quite yet."
"We have traveled far together, and yet, there is much we don't know about each other's lives."
The Dwarf nodded.
"Well," Legolas looked down at the new wood of the ship's grey deck, an odd little smile playing around the edges of his mouth, "here is a tale that has never been told in Middle-earth. I have just remembered it. It happened a long time ago, and yet, it has not happened yet."
"Must Elves always speak in riddles?"
"Yes. It keeps the Dwarves guessing. And it keeps their attention almost as well as good ale."
"It started with a bath. A bath on a midsummer's night."

At the Sign of the Pooping Pony
Monday: Lizard
"Dude, you're supposed to put the used shavings on the poop cart."
I looked up to find Dana leaning on the stall door, and a pile of fresh shavings in the battered wheelbarrow affectionately known as Manure Force One. "Oh." I said and started scratching them back into the stall. Behind me, Cherokee flicked an ear and dropped a nice fresh pile for me. Dana grinned, the lean brown dog at her side grinned wider, like a hyena. Horse humor, ha ha. You just wait, you big spotted lump.
"You've been in some other world all day. What's up, Lizard?"
Dana's one of exactly four people in the known universe who can call me that and get away with it. My real name's Elizabeth, like a queen with too much makeup. Liz for short. But a few people claim Lizard fits better. Dana's old. Older than my Mom I mean, not old like Gandalf or something. It's her barn, on a handful of acres called the Greenwood, backed up against the sprawl of a State Forest. The Greenwood contains an old weathered barn, remodeled to hold a dozen horses, an outdoor arena with a good sand surface protected from weather by a circle of pines and spruce, a house that's mostly an eighteenth century log cabin, and a bunch of rich kids' horses. I'm not a rich kid so I trade poop-scooping for time on the horses instead of behind them.
"Geek World." I said. If there's a bigger geek in the world than me it's my friend Lorien. When a teacher asked her what her favorite sport was, she said glosseopia. I can't even pronounce it. It means she could hand in an essay or poetry in perfect Elvish (Sindarin or Quenya) and the teacher had to give her an "A" because they didn't have a clue how to grade it. We're best friends the way Legolas and Gimli are. It was raised hackles at first sight. She's short and pudgy and funny looking and has fuzzy hair that stuck out all over, and the kind of glasses that scream "book nerd!" not fashion statement, she dresses like a refugee from the sixties. I'm into running and horses and climbing trees (and rock walls and anything else) and beating up any boy that calls me Lizard.
A couple of weeks after I first saw her, Lorien showed up in home room with a big fat book that weighed about as much as all her class books put together. Lord of the Rings. She'd actually read it more times than I'd seen the movie. Her mom had started reading it to her before she was born. One of those weird ideas intellectual parents have about raising smart kids. that's where they got her name, of course, from The Book. Hey, her parents were bigger geeks than her. Who else would name their lawnmower Bill the Pony.
Her book had pictures by some guy named Alan Lee. I liked the way he painted horses, and his Aragorn looked just like the one in the movie. Of course he designed some of the stuff in the movie, although I don't think he designed Viggo Mortenson. If you were going to invent a face like that, you'd have to be a girl. He never did Legolas' face though, that kind of bugged me, at first. I wanted to see it.
Lorien saw my Legolas bookmark and started telling me all this stuff that was in the book. Stuff I didn't remember from the movie. Stuff like Legolas shooting down a Nazgul, or running under the stars in Mirkwood, or being a kickass whitewater paddler, or standing at the edge of Fangorn, listening to the trees, or turning back and riding to the Huorn wood, and wanting to talk to the trees. I knew about herons and Hurons, but huorns?
There was a lot more that wasn't in the movie. The best was when Legolas got Arod from the Rohirrim, and rode him without saddle or bridle, because he had The Elvish Way With All Good Beasts.
Wow. Awesome. Just like the stunt guy who rode Shadowfax in the movie. Only better. Lorien gave me an old paperback version of LOTR to borrow. I paid her back with about thirty years worth of X-Men, after I told her all the stuff that wasn't in those movies.
"The Elf is fuzzy?"
Yeah, like the velvety end of a horse's nose. And blue. And the wizard is bald, and the dwarf has claws instead of a battleax, and Strider has flaming eyeballs instead of a flaming sword. And the girls kick more butt.
I read The Book inside a week. It took Lorien a little longer to plow through classic Uncanny X-Men, but she fell for the blue fuzzy elf the first day. Lorien came to the Greenwood and rode three days later. She rode like Gimli. Pumpkin didn't mind. Too much.
I looked up and Dana was still leaning on the slidey door with the kind of endless patience Pumpkin has for beginning riders. She'd stay there till I said something. Not just anything either, but what was really bugging me.
"Me and Lorien, the Geek Patrol. The only two girls in our class who don't have a better wardrobe than the latest boobychick on the cover of whatever. The only two girls who are never gonna make it to Homecoming, or Prom, or even a barn dance."
"Sounds like you need a Faerie Godmother."
"Yeah, really."
Dana grinned, stopped leaning on the stall door and went to fetch the grain.
Two days later, I was firing up the truck to leave, the one Dad had welded and ductaped together out of three other ones. It's a Ford Ranger, kind of greenish and brownish and greyish (five shades of primer, door, fender and tailgate from different trucks), but it's got a big kickass engine, and the kind of tires that could climb Caradhras.
Of course I named it Strider.
Dana came out of the barn with a paper bag in her hand. "Here." she thrust it at me through the window. "A gift from your Faerie Godmother."
Kodi stood up from his place on the seat beside me and stuck his wet Siberian nose into the bag. He snorted, and went back to his side of the truck seat. I peered in and saw a bunch of dried herbish looking stuff on the top of it all, and a couple of outrageous feathers poking through. "It's not anything illegal, is it?"
She laughed, "Sage, sweetgrass, some other herbs, a few rocks, couple of bones, some feathers, all quite legal. There's a couple more items you'll need to find yourself, but there's a list with the directions in there."
I pulled out one of the feathers; definitely not from anything native to southcentral Pennsylvania, so no protected species, nothing the Game Commission would have fits about. The feather, and its mates were a good foot long and they were clipped and notched the way some headdress feathers were among certain Native American tribes; showing the status and accomplishments of the wearer.
But they were no colors any traditional Indian would wear; patterned in bright blues and greens, and shaded with impossible purples. "Somebody pluck a parrot? Or a circus performer?"
"Beats me. A friend sent me that stuff when I asked about the spell."
Ok...some weird NewAgey Native Americanish ritual thingie, the barn always smelled like sage or incense. Every stall had a bundle of herbs or a dreamcatcher or a wreath. Maybe it wasn't real magic, like Gandalf or Professor X could do, but hey...you never know. The mind is a powerful thing, Dana said that all the time. Maybe it would work if I believed.
Her face looked serious. "Be sure to follow the directions exactly." she intoned, "And be careful what you wish for."

Meddle Not in the Affairs of Wizards
Wednesday Night at the Campfire Circle: Lizard
I swear, I followed the directions exactly. Even the part with facing east and a moon shaped like a drawn bow and the feathers and the funny chant, and the green leaves...you try finding four green leaves on the last day of October. Ok, maybe I got the chant wrong. I shoulda' got Lorien, she's the language geek, besides Elvish, she speaks about half a dozen other languages. But there I was in my backwoods in the middle of a very cold freakin' night and there's this blammoblooey of green light and the next thing I know there's this tall, lean, dark-haired guy standing there in our campfire circle looking like he just saw a balrog.
Oh yeah, and he was dripping wet and wearing absolutely nothing.
I stared, he stared, I stared some more. With great difficulty I made my eyes fix on his face.
Holy great piles of horse crap, the spell actually worked...
I finally remembered how to breathe again.
Nekkid Guy's expression changed to one of complete consternation and he turned and vanished soundlessly into the woods.
Great. Wonderful. Typical. Summon Prince Charming and lose him all in the same thirty seconds. Story of my life. I grabbed up the survival gear I always brought out to the campfire circle; blanket and a headlamp and a cell phone and a compass and my dog and plunged in after him. It's a big woods. It's actually a State Forest, and we're lucky enough to live on the edges of it, like Dana. I could just see Prince Charming freaking out and getting lost in there. And me having to send in rescue dogs and the National Guard and helicopters and everything. And having to explain it.
Kodiak found him inside five minutes. Nekkid Guy wasn't shivering at all. In fact he looked a little annoyed that I had found him. Until Kodi shoved his nose into the guy's face. He was crouching, maybe he knew about dogs and where they liked to stick their noses. He knelt there, on the trail, Kodi grinning in his lap, like a big furry Siberian blanket, staring into the bright halogen bean of my headlamp without even blinking.
"Um." What do you say to a guy who was probably enjoying a nice hot shower five minutes ago and is now freezing in somebody's woods. At least the poison ivy is all dead now. "Sorry." I held out the blanket. I didn't make him get up.
He took it and wrapped it around him, and Kodi, like a cloak. He let loose a stream of some language I didn't know. At least it didn't sound like he was swearing at me. In fact, it was kinda' beautiful. Like the way a creek flows over rocks, or the way wind blows through the trees.
Uh, ok, now what. I tried English again.
He cocked one falcon-wing eyebrow, then talked again. This time it sounded different. Harder around the edges, not like song, like the first time.
I shook my head. I knew a little Spanish, most of it rude. And enough sign language to look the way an old Tarzan movie sounded. I tried both anyway. I drew blank looks and another beautifully cocked eyebrow. The eyebrow wasn't the only thing about him that was beautiful. I was starting to wish I hadn't given him that blanket.
He sighed, said something to Kodi, something soft and low and musical, like nightwind in the trees. Kodi grinned up at him. Kodi grins at everyone.
Then Kodi turned and practically dragged me back down the trail toward the house. He's got thousands of years of ancestry bred for dragging, so I didn't get to turn around and see if the guy was following until we got in the underwater glow of the big security light by the shed.
He was there, a couple of strides behind me. Staring wide-eyed up at the pole light like it was magic or something. He said something in that fluid sounding language.
And I recognized a word. I'd heard it about a zillion times in the movie.
Galad.
Elvish for light.
I stared for about an eternity into eyes like a moonlit sea, set between ears that were shaped like the new-opened leaf of a beech tree.
Then I got Lorien on the cell.

Lorien had an older brother who was about three sizes bigger than the Elf. I had a Dad about four inches shorter than his six feet or so of height, but closer to his lean, lithe build. Between us we came up with enough clothes to keep him from freezing to death, or getting us arrested. I explained about the sage and the chant and the the whole green light thingie. Lorien didn't think I'd gone around the bend. It's the thing I like best about her. She doesn't think I'm a geek.
Lorien said a few words to the Elf, and we went back down the trail to the campfire circle, hoping everyone was going to stay asleep in my house for awhile, and not wonder where I was. Lorien's house didn't count. They'd just figure she was logging educational hours on the internet, or reading another couple of books.
I lit a fire, and we cozied up to it. Lorien introduced me, and herself, getting a raised eyebrow at her name. She launched into a lengthy conversation, the lengthy being mostly on his part, she was good, but she still sounded like a Hobbit talking to an Elf-lord. Then I picked out a couple more familiar words. Eryn Lasgalen. Courtesy of Lorien, I knew that was the Elvish name for Mirkwood.
And Legolas Thranduilion.
Urp. Yep, I saw the extended version about a million times too. Not just any old Legolas Greenleaf.
The Legolas.
Thranduil's son.
Lorien and I stared at each other. No way.
She fired a couple more questions at him.
Yes, way.
"What were you supposed to be doing in this ritual? The part where you pictured your ideal man?"
"Ah." I studied the dark hair, falling to his waist, the eyes which were any color but blue, and a face that was impossible to describe; there were cheekbones like gull-wings, and chiseled edges, and ears that were slightly leaf-shaped, and skin like moonlight on beach, and it all added up to something uncannily beautiful, but not like anything I'd ever seen.
"He does not look at all like Orlando Bloom." I said.
"Orlando Bloom is an actor. A very good one. A very English, very human one."
"The human part's debatable." I said. " Anyway, this guy's hair's dark." I think I sounded a little whiney. He was supposed to be blond, dammit.
"Tolkien never said what color his hair was."
"Yeah but his dad was blond, it's in The Hobbit."
"We don't know what color his mother was, and most Elves were dark."
His eyes were going from one to the other of us with that patient look Pumpkin had with newbie riders.
Kodi was staring at him in pure adoration. We stared at him awhile longer, pretty much in pure adoration too. I tried to remember if he could read minds like Galadriel. If he could, I was in deep doo doo.
"What are we going to do with him?" Lorien asked.
"Do with him? I was thinking prom date...or something. I was expecting some guy from class to just ask, I was expecting some girl to introduce me...us...to her brother. I did not expect to rip the Prince of Mirkwood out of his bath!"
"Do with him." Lorien stated, " Here he is. He doesn't speak English, he doesn't have a car, a job or a social security number. And in fifty years, he will look exactly the same, and people will begin to ask questions. And then someone will kidnap him and stick him under a microscope. And most importantly, " she eyed her watch, "it is one AM and we are in the middle of the woods."
Hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo HOO! boomed out of the woods, awfully close. Lorien jumped and squeaked like a mouse.
"Just a Great Horned Owl." I said, and paused for effect; "Four foot wingspan, one thousand psi per talon tip, likes to eat skunks and the odd Shi Tzu for lunch."
Lorien sat back down and inched closer to our mighty Elven warrior. He gave her an odd look and hooted softly back at the hidden owl. "Where are we going to put him?" Lorien said.
Hoo-hoo HOO! the owl called back.
"He comes from the woods." I said, as he answered the owl.
"You're going to tell a Prince to camp out in your backyard?"
"They camped all the time in the book, I think he knows how to camp. And it's not like I can smuggle him into my room. I can see Mom; 'What's that?' 'Oh, just pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain, it's only a figment of my imagination."
Except that it wasn't. There he was, solid and real in my Dad's sneakers and Lorien's brother's mountain jacket, and jeans just a bit too short. He didn't even have his bow or his knives. Knife, if you're a book geek like Lorien.
"I mean, there he was, " Lorien was saying, "bathing in a pool on a nice warm summer night in Mirkwood and bamf! he ends up here. In the butt hind end of Pennsylvania. In October."
Lorien never says butt.
"He's taking it rather well." I offered. He was still holding an in-depth conversation with the owl, now perched in the shadows over our heads. I looked at my watch. "Anyway, it's November now."
"He asked if you were allied with the Dark Side."
"What did you tell him?"
"Only when you're PMSing."
"You didn't!"
Lorien gave me one of her smiles. The one that makes Sauron look friendly.
He turned his attention from the owl and made a small, polite, inquisitive noise.
"You could put him in your spare room." I told her. He'd probably vanish in the clutter.
"Too hard to explain, even to my parents. We should send him back."
I stared at Lorien, looking just like a grouper about to swallow a refrigerator. Send back the man...er...Elf, she'd been in love with since she was five? That I'd been in love with since I was...well, since Peter Jackson put New Zealand on the map. "Nooooo! Not yet! Anyway, I have no idea how!"
"He should go back. People will miss him. Anyway, they need him in the Fellowship ."
"Hasn't all that already happened?"
"No. I got a blank look when I asked about Gollum and Bilbo and Thorin Oakenshield and he'd never heard of Aragorn either. You must have pulled him from some time before the events of The Hobbit or LOTR."
"It doesn't matter, they can just send Glorfindel or Elrohir or someone. Anyway, can't we just keep him for awhile?"
Lorien gave me a hard look, "He is not a lost puppy." She turned and stared into the fire.
"Hoo hoo hoo." The owl suggested.
"Hoo hoo-hoo hoo." the Prince replied.
"Dana." Lorien said at last. "She gave you the spell, she probably knows how to reverse it. And at least she could put him up till we figure this out. She's read the book too."
That would work. "Yeah, I guess."
Lorien turned to our guest...I was still having trouble thinking of this dark-haired guy in sneakers and the bright red mountain parka as the Prince of Mirkwood...Lorien rattled off a fluid stretch of Elvish, Sindarin I guess. I did remember those were his people, book impaired as Lorien claims I am. He nodded and followed us to Lorien's car.
I couldn't see his face, because I got squashed into the back with Kodi, but he spent a lot of time clutching the dash and firing terse Sindarin comments at Lorien. She didn't bother translating. I figured it was stuff like "Slow down, no don't take that cornersofast!, no noooo, is your mind full of squirrels?!, watch out for that deeeeer, and what's that flashing? and Aiiieeee!, a roadhog, a roadhog is come, we're all doomed!"
He untangled himself from the seatbelt and jumped out before the car quite stopped, looking like a guy who'd just got swallowed by a monster and spit back out.

Gwennin Na'lim (Gone Fishing) or The Maiden of Duracell
tad: Legolas
I remember the fish."
"Fish? Ehhh, fish. Promise me there are cows in Aman." Gimli said. From somewhere in the vicinity of the mainmast came a plaintive "maaaaa-aaa-aaa". Even the ship's goats were losing their sea-legs in this weather.
"I speak of the fish in the pool, the bathing pool. Beautiful, round as Hobbit party platters, flat as pancakes, and a whole rainbow of colors. One was orange, orange with blue flecks, like jewels...another was..."
"I wish to hear the whole of this tale before I die, so perhaps we should skip the fish."
Legolas gave him a look, like a child who has had a favorite toy taken from him. Gimli sighed a patient sigh and Legolas went on, "I was watching the fish and there was a flash of green light, and the pool and the warmth were gone. I was by a small fire, in a circle of sawn logs, in a bare-leaved wood. With a very surprised girl staring at me."
"Was she beautiful?"
"She was of the Edain, but that is all I noticed. I was in the bath, remember?"
Gimli chuckled. "And what did she think..."
"I fled into the woods."
"Well that was brilliant. No wonder you've been single for, what, two thousand years?"
"I'm not that old. And it is different for our folk. We..."
"The fish, no, no, not the fish, the girl..."
"She found me. Well her dog did. A strange sort, like a small wolf, gentle, silver and white, with blue eyes and he was tied to a light strong string that coiled and uncoiled out of a case on the girl's belt, I wished I could bring you one so you could see how it worked..." his fingers flew out and back, describing the strange device.
"How about the girl?"
"Tall, lean, with hair like sparrow's wings."
"It had feathers in it?"
"No, no! The color!"
"Can't Elves ever just say anything straight out, as in; 'She had brown hair' ?"
"No. And she bore on her head a light like," his eyes misted over, "like a Silmaril." he whispered.
Gimli sat up in surprise, "No!"
"Yes. Some magic the Edain had made. I learned later that it involved trapping the energy of a mysterious substance called Duracell."
"Sounds Elvish."
"More like Dwarvish."
"Well what did the Maiden of Duracell do?" Gimli asked.
"Gave me a blanket. She spoke a word in a strange tongue, but I felt its meaning; sorry, she said, as if she had something to do with my being there."
"Where was there?"
"A dark, cold wood, after leaf-fall. It felt much like the Greenwood, after the dark things were driven out. But she was dressed oddly; close-fiitting blue pants and a great coat, like a down quilt. One might have mistaken her for a young man." Legolas said.
"Like Dernhelm."
"Yes." his eyebrows folded, "But in a contest of strength between those two, I would not bet on Dernhelm. I tried to speak to her, but she knew no language of Middle-earth that I knew. So I asked her dog to take us home. Perhaps there would be others there with whom I could speak. We came out of the woods to a cluster of buildings; a great hall and a barn. And a light. Ah, the light, what a strange and wondrous thing, on a pole as tall as a tree, it threw silver light in a circle a furlong wide! I asked her about it, but she still did not understand me. But for one word; galad. She knew that word."
"What strange place was this?"
The Elf's smile grew, "Middle-earth."

First First Breakfast
(three hours past Elevensies) Friday, 2am: Lizard
Somehow Dana wasn't surprised to find us knocking on her door at two am. She led us into her kitchen, full of hanging herbs, bookshelves (yeah, in the kitchen) and cats. Three of them came right over and twined around the Elf's feet. Kodi leaned toward them with the kind of smile I reserved for Godiva chocolates. I'd known the cats for a year and two of them still snobbed me off. Then there was Shenzi. The Malenois was a little smaller and leaner than a German Shepard, with five times the attitude. She'd terrorized door to door religion salesmen, drunken teenagers, a rabid skunk, and an arsonist. Figures she'd cozy right up to the Elf.
Lorien and I sat at the big wooden table, Dana pulled out a gallon of milk and some powdered baking cocoa, organic hooney and stirred up four hot chocolates. She popped them in the nuker, and produced a box of cookies.
The Elf...Legolas... I had to make my brain think of him that way...moved silently around the kitchen like a caged wolf, staring at books and clock and Dana's collection of horse figurines (scattered through the whole house like a manic wild herd) and the toaster and the refrigerator humming softly to itself in the corner, and the blender and the stove with its flat burnerless top (and a pot of good smelling herbs steaming cheerfully away on it) and the pile of magazines with their glossy photos.
He had the same look of wonder on his face that he had when he rode into Rivendell, in the movie. When he was blond and Orlando Bloom. Then the microwave bleeped and he spun like a cornered cat, hand reaching for a knife that wasn't there.
It occured to me he had no idea what a microwave was or even color photos. I tried to imagine an Elvish word for microwave.
No. It'd be like Dwarves trying to ride horses.
Lorien was trying to explain stuff to him. He held up his mug of steaming chocolate and said something with a question mark at the end of it. Lorien opened the fridge and handed him the gallon of milk. Both dogs and three cats watched him closely, hoping he was going to drop something edible on the floor. He held a hand up to the fridge, like he was warding off something evil. Then stepped up to it like a deer walking into a clearing full of potential predators. He ducked and studied the little light, turned and made another question mark with his voice, soft as wind in the trees.
Lorien bumbled through a few hestitant bits of Elvish, then, for once, ran out of words.
He shrugged and Lorien closed the door. He was still holding the gallon of milk. Staring at it like it was some kind of unknown and potentially lethal mushroom.
Lorien said something, and pointed to Dana's cow magnet on the fridge.
The Elf's eyebrows went up in an 'aha!' of enlightenment. He handed back the gallon, and said something in Elvish.
"They don't seem to have cows in Mirkwood." Lorien said.
"OH." Dana said. "I hope he's not lactose-intolerant. Maybe I should have used the soy milk."
Too late, he was already sipping his chocolate. He set it down and picked up a copy of People Magazine, graced with the latest bubblychick in bare midriff and painted on jeans, he wrinkled his eyebrows and asked Lorien something. He looked kind of appalled.
Right there he went up about another 500 points on my male-o-meter.
We sat with our hot chocolate, Lorien and I both talking at once, the story tumbling out like hyperactive puppies.
Dana was only slightly surprised that, with her spell, I'd conjured up a fictional character, now sipping hot chocolate at her table and talking to her cats. "This is a new spell for me." she explained. "I mean, attracting love can be tricky, and it's far from my specialty." She made a wry face, she was still single. "Got this one from one of my friends. She didn't say where she found it." She studied Legolas.
He looked up at her over the rim of his mug, the way her horses do sometimes; calm, interested, intense, as if there's a conversation going on I can't hear. "Oh boy." Dana said to us, "You have done it." She was silent for a moment. "Of course, it is All Hallows Eve, Samhain. Traditionally the night when the gates between the worlds open, and all manner of things come through."
"We can put him back, can't we?" Lorien said.
"Noooo, not yet!" I punched her in the arm.
"I don't know the counterspell." Dana said. "If there is one."
"Can't you just do the other one backwards?" Lorien asked.
"No." Dana said.
I let out a big sigh of relief. "Maybe we have to wait till next Halloween?"
Lorien got a worried look on her face. She glanced at Legolas, and fidgeted with her hair the way she does when she's thinking real hard about something, and her brain starts smoking.
"He's a character from a book!" I said, "It doesn't matter if we send him back!"
Dana gave me one of those long, patient Pumpkin looks.
"Right?"
Lorien stood up, held up one of Legolas's hands, he cocked an eyebrow at her, probably wondering what strange custom this was. "Does he look like a figment of your twisted imagination?"
"No, mine would have been blond and blue-eyed." I briefly contemplated my first pointy-eared love, "Or blue and blond-eyed."
"Exactly. You summoned him, but you summoned the real one! And now you have to put him back!"
"Well, we can't."
"We can't." Dana said. "You can. You summoned him, somehow. I lay bets you're the only one who can send him back."
Whew, well, that was a relief. At least Lorien couldn't do it without me.
She glared at me from the other side of the table. Still holding Legolas' hand.
He looked at her, then at me. His expression was as readable as a hawk's.
I took a great interest in my chocolate just then.
"I'll start researching it." Dana said. "In the meantime, please explain to him that he can sack out in the living room. Show him how the fouton works and where the guest blankets are in the chest. And tell him about the fridge and the nuker." She paused, "Uh, and the bathroom."
Lorien sat down, still holding Legolas' hand, explaining everything. Her Elvish was already sounding more fluid. Sometimes I just hate her.

Iau in'gonathras (Fruit of the Loom)
nel: Legolas
"Well of course it's Middle-earth, where else would it be?" Gimli stared up into the rigging. At the moment, a lithe Elven woman clad in a short tunic and leggings was untangling a bit of line just over his head.
Legolas gave a sigh of endless patience, "Dwarves have such limited imaginations, except where the virtues of Elven women are concerned."
"Hrmmmmp." Gimnli's attention returned, reluctantly, to the heaving deck.
"There are many worlds, many possibilities, even for this one, all of these woven together like a great forest..."
"I was not looking for a course in Elvish philosophy, merely the rest of the tale."
"Ai." Legolas sighed again. "It was Middle-earth, but not any land you or I have walked, nor any we have seen on any map."
Gimli leaned forward, studying his friend's face, "Then what land was it?"
Legolas shook his head, "I think that will wait for later in the tale. We stood under the light, the Maiden of Light and I, and the dog, Kodi, she called him, but she did not say her name, yet. Nor ask me mine. She still had a look upon her face as if ..."
"Yes?"
"She was quite surprised to have found me there. From her pocket she drew out a device, smaller than the palm of her hand, dark and polished, with strange designs running about it, in very odd colors; bright blue, like the sky over the mountains, and orange like fire, and a green that hurt the eyes..."
"What did it do?"
"She punched a few buttons on its face. It made a merry little tune. Then she spoke to it, I remember she said 'Lorien'."
"The Golden Wood?"
A smile grew on the Elf's face, "She was speaking to her friend, far away, a girl named Lorien."
"Speaking, far away, it was a, a ..." Gimli whispered, "palantir?"
"No, mellon, not a stone such as the wizards used. More magic of the Edain. Like the carriage which needed no horses to draw it; it roared like Beorn the Bear-man, and fumed a great stench like Smaug himself. For eyes it had lamps that cut the night like swords of light, like the light of Galadriel herself. Lorien arrived in such a carriage..."
"With a name like that she must have been fair as a maiden of the Golden Wood."
A gentle look passed across the Elf's face, "That depends on how you mean 'fair'. She was short, and stout, round about the edges, and had dark hair that stuck out like this," he held his hands out some distance from the side of his head.
"Ah!" Gimli said with satisfaction, "A real woman, with meat on her bones! One of my kin?"
"Perhaps. With a kind heart. But no beard. And she spoke the Elvish tongues. Well enough for us to talk, at least."
"No doubt an Elf unable to speak would die of frustration."
He cocked an annoyed eyebrow at Gimli. "They brought me some clothes. Odd things, such as the Maiden of Light wore. Sturdy blue pants, with a strange closure like," he frowned, closed thumb and forefinger and moved them up and down, then he interlaced his fingers waving them before the Dwarf's nose. He finally shook his head, unable to make it clear, "It was positively Dwarvish. They called it a zipper. And if one is not careful, the teeth bite. Places one would rather not think about. And then there was The Fruit of the Loom. Underwear, they called it, as if one needs to wear anything under. Odd people, very odd."
He paused and said a strange word in a language the Dwarf did not know.
"What?" he interrupted.
"It is the Maiden of Light's name. It translates as 'Lizard'."
"Lizard? That is an odd name for a fair maiden."
"She is an odd fair maiden. We did not go up to the Great Hall, for they did not wish to disturb Lizard's parents. It seemed my arrival was something they wished to keep secret. We returned to the campfire circle and talked. They were startled, disbelieving when they learned my name." he paused, for suspense.
"What, get on with it."
"..they already knew my name, and that of my father, and of the Greenwood. They knew me!"
"What? How?"
"'We have heard tales of your land'. Lorien told me. What tales, I could not imagine then. I had certainly done nothing worthy of a song or a tale."
"When was this?"
"A long time ago, before the Coming of the Dragon to the Lonely Mountain. Lorien spoke the names of Bilbo, and Thorin, and Aragorn, and I did not know them."
"If it was before the Coming of the Dragon, how did she know them?"
"From the tale. As she knew the names of Galadriel, and Pippin, and even you."
"Me! I was not yet born!"
"Yes, mellon, even you."
"How can they know the names of the Fellowship and yet it is before the Coming of the Dragon? That is preposterous!" Gimli said.
"The River of Time does not flow in all places the same."
"The River of Time?"
"If I must explain Elvish science, we will never finish this tale."
"Elves...time...hmmmph. Time is a straightforward matter. Things happen, then more things happen because of the first things that happened. It's simple. Elves make everything so complex."
Legolas rolled his eyes skyward, trying to explain such things to the Dwarf was like pouring water on a rock, nothing sank in. "Nevertheless, this is how it happened, will happen..."
"There you go again with the time strangeness."
"Whatever."
"Whatever what?"
"It is an expression of theirs. Whatever. The two maidens argued for awhile in their own tongue, looking at me now and again." He made a wry face, "They looked like us."
Gimli broke into a smile, "Two women, two! Wrestling over you, hah! And one Dwarvish! And what did you do? Bring neither one of them back!"
"Ahhhh. I could not...ai." Legolas paused and looked off into the grey mist. The ship rolled on, the wind blew, the white foam flew. From somewhere belowdecks came the warm delicious scent of Elvish cooking. A scent Gimli did not recognize.
"Ahem." Gimli suggested.
Legolas turned back to his friend and the tale, "We entered their carriage then, and drove to another house, smaller than the first, with a great stable, and gardens. Elo!, Sam would have loved the place, but he would have been too busy with his shears, for it was all wild and overgrown, like the wood around our halls in Eryn Lasgalen. A woman lived there, of the Edain she was, but with an air of the Istari about her. We entered her kitchen, and ate wonderous food, a hot drink like," he closed his eyes.
Gimli leaned forward, the Elf's expression looked as blissful as a Hobbit contemplating elevensies. "What?"
"It is indescribable."
"And would probably take days to describe if you tried, but go on anyway, I'll take my chances."
"Drink of the Valar." he said wistfully, "Chocolate, they called it. They mixed it into the milk of cows."
Gimli eyed the goats perched well out of the spray on their shelter by the mainmast. He had hoped they were destined to end up on his dinner plate, but it seemed their purpose was to provide a fine, spinnable wool, and an excellent cheese, as well as butter and cream for cooking. He had never seen Legolas' folk drink the milk straight.
"But they are not small children! They are beyond the age of drinking milk."
"Not in this land. They have the strange custom of drinking it even after they are grown."
"Like Hobbits."
"Yes."
"And there was strange waybread," he held up thumb and finger for size, "this big, shaped like Dwarves in hoods, two wafers, with a marvelous cream filling. They told me the runes stamped on them said 'Keebler'. Ah! And such wonders! Books everywhere, even in the kitchen."
"Odd place for a library."
"The whole house was a library. And horses, this big, and this," he gestured with his hands, "fine crafted and so real you could almost hear the thunder of their hooves. And the books...with pictures as real as life! But pictures of a strange world; with people, yes, and trees and hounds and horses, but..."he fell silent, shaking his head.
"Go on, tell me more about this wonderous place!"
"Yes, there is more to tell, a strange and wonderous world. But," his eyes got a faraway look in them, the look Gimli had seen when Legolas first heard the wail of gulls in the dark. " A world of the Edain, for none of our folk seemed to be left in it."

Anne and the King of the Living Dead
Wednesday 4 am: Lizard
I sneaked in about four am. I got some bacon from the fridge and gave it to Kodi, hoping he'd stay quiet. He did.
As I was pulling the covers on my bed back I noticed something weird had happened to my room decor. Oh the books and the stuffed animals and the horse collection were still there, and the computer clutter and the starships hanging from the ceiling, and the whale collection dangling from the curtain rod, and the shelf full of X-Men still fighting evil. But the Legolas action figure on the Breyer horse Smokey, the one that just happened to be his size, the one that had graced my computer (except when the cat knocked it off and broke his tail so I had to fix it with epoxy and real horsehair... nevermind... squirrel!) since last year was gone. I dove under the desk, searching the floor. Nope.
Then I saw the horse on another shelf, same grulla Smokey horse, sans Elf. Weird.
And my poster was missing, the big one on the back of the door, with Legolas in the woods, bow half drawn. Gone, gone, gone.
Whoa! Well, of course! We, ok, I pulled him out of Middle-earth, before the events of The Fellowship, Lorien said, so maybe they did send someone else with the Fellowship. Oh well, their loss, our gain. We had the real one now, not just an action figure.
I reached out to flick off the light and noticed one last thing; the whole LOTR action figure collection. It occurred to me to look among the figures and see who replaced Legolas.
Except that the whole collection looked weird. Like they'd been designed after a particularly bad nightmare; Anne Rice and Stephen King honeymooning on the Night of the Living Dead in Dracula's Castle. I stared and blinked and didn't believe it. I pulled down a particularly nasty looking orc and shook it. And something that looked like a mutated Hobbit. I ran to the shelf that housed the movie book.
Something was wrong, big bad really awfully wretchedly wrong.
The bad guys, it seems, had won.

When It All Goes South
Thursday, bleary 7:30 am: Lizard
"Just look at this!" Lorien thrust her copy of LOTR under my nose, the one it took a crane to lift, the special anniversary edition with the Alan Lee paintings in it, where you never see Legolas' face. So you can imagine it any way you want.
"Look!" she was practically shrieking. She thumped it down on my lap before I even had her car's seatbelt on. Lorien was babbling somewhere between tears and 'this is it you're gonna die'.
I let the rest of my schoolbooks slide to the floor and peeled her book open. Carefully. It was one of those treasures she never let out of the house. So why was it here now, on my stable-work encrusted lap?
I had a really bad feeling about this.
Yep. Alan Lee had vanished, or mutated into something really scary. Like I've seen some hard-core comic books that were less scary than this.
"Uh oh." I said.
Lorien was still babbling, her voice wailing right up into the zone with fingernails on chalkboards. "...and when Frodo says 'I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!' there's no Gollum to bite off his finger and take it into the fire!"
"What?" I dropped The Book and shook her. "What are you talking about?"
"Haven't you been listening to anything I've said? No, of course you haven't!"
"Gollum? What's Gollum got to do with this?"
She closed her eyes and put the backs of her hands together, raising them slowly from her middle to her chin, breathing really slow, then letting it all out in one carefully controlled breath. Centering breaths she called them. Some weird obi-wan-zen of kung-fu-tai-chi thing. She gave me a long hard look. "You aren't surprised."
"Well...my action figure collection looked kinda' different last night..."
"Action figures! This is not about action figures! It's about real flesh and blood people who have just had their world ripped to shreds!"
"I think you're over-reacting."
"I AM NOT..." she closed her eyes and did another re-centering breath.
"Gollum." I suggested, quietly, very quietly.
"Gollum was a pivotal character." Lorien said, trying not to clench her teeth. "Remember how Gandalf councils Frodo not to be too swift to pass out death and judgement?"
"Uh, yeah, sure."
"Frodo doesn't throw the ring in the fire." she said with the kind of patience reserved for extremely dense children. "Frodo never throws the Ring into the Fire. Not in the original story, not anywhere else. He never actually does what he sets out to do because the power of the Ring becomes too much for him. He claims it for his own!"
"Oh...yeah." I forgot about that part, mainly because Legolas wasn't in it. "Right."
"It gets destroyed anyway, because of the compassion he and Sam showed Gollum. It's Gollum who destroys it!"
I never did get that part, they avoid doing the obviously smart thing of just squashing the little bugger, then he bites of Frodo's finger, and that's a good thing. Aren't the Good Guys supposed to just kick butt?
Lorien continued, her voice desperate, "Without Gollum, Frodo becomes the next Dark Lord!"
"Whoa, Mini Vader." I tried to picture it, but it bent my mind too much. "And what the hell does that have to do with our Elf?"
Lorien gave me the longest, patientest...most patient...look she could muster. Through tight teeth she said, "Why was Legolas at the Council of Elrond?"
"Uh...I do remember he was wearing camoflage; well, green and brown..."
She closed her eyes and did another recentering breath. "He was a messenger from his father."
"Uh huh..."
"The message was...?" she gestured toward me for the answer.
"Um. That Aragorn was the once and future King of Gondor?"
"It's Rivendell! He was raised there! They already know that! Except for some thick-headed Gondorians!"
She glared at me. I gave her a winning smile. It didn't win anything.
"The message was that the prisoner that Aragorn had left with," she made little quote signs in the air, she always did that when she was quoting a line from The Book, "the watchful Elves of Mirkwood, had escaped. Legolas was one of those Watchful Elves. Possibly the leader of the company set to watch the prisoner that day, and he escaped."
"Prisoner?"
"Gollum, you idiot!"
"Ok, so why would that change the book?"
"If Legolas wasn't there, maybe Gollum wouldn't have escaped. Then, when Frodo and Sam reach Mordor, Gollum is still safely in the keeping of the Watchful Elves of Mirkwood and there is no Gollum to bite off Frodo's finger and destroy the Ring!"
"That's nuts."
"A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can alter the course of a hurricane in India." she stated.
Honestly, I don't know where she gets this stuff.
"Anyway, there it is, you messed with it, and it's changed."
"How do we know if it'll change back, if we send him back? Maybe it's too late. Maybe it was some other reason. Maybe..."
She was getting really good at that glare thing.
"What if we can't change it and we send him back into that world ruled by the Dark Hobbit Lord of Doom?"
"What if a couple of Hobbits couldn't make it to Mount Doom in the first place? They tried anyway. And succeeded."
"At least in one version of the story."
"Yes."
"Oh boy...what are we gonna do?"
"Send him back!"
"LIke how, I mean if Dana can't find anything."
"She will. Or we will go to the ends of the earth looking!" She stared straight into my eyes with that Lorien look that means not hell, high water, parental units, or Tar-jhaaaay being closed will stay her from her course.
"Hey," I brightened, "maybe we could summon Gandalf, or Obi-Wan..."
Lorien sat up, grabbed me by the front of my grungey t-shirt, "No no no nonononononoNO NO!"
"...Hermione?" I sid hopefully, "Professor X?"
"NO!"
" I know, the Doctor! What we need is a time lord."
"Don't even imagine it!"

The Taming of Beowabbit
Thursday evening: Lizard
We met at the Greenwood barn right after school, horse poop is more important than homework, and we wanted to find out how far Dana had got in her search. Not very. The friend she had got it from didn't even remember it. The original spell, that is. She went back through her books and couldn't find anything like it. Not unusual, Dana said, she couldn't find her car keys most of the time either. Of course Dana couldn't be too specific about exactly what had really happened with the spell; summoning a supposedly fictional character out of his bath was something not even Dana's oddest friends would believe.
The weird thing was neither Dana or I could remember the spell either. She'd looked at it before she gave it to me, she was sure of that. But she didn't remember anything about it. Not the chant or the green leaves or the bow moon or the strange feathers. At least I remembered the moon and the feathers and the leaves. But the chant...
Lorien's the linguist, and she hadn't been there.
And the paper it had all been written down on was gone, burned in the fire like the spell had demanded.
And I had about a dozen stalls to clean.
Except that they already were. Clean, I mean. Our Elf was perched on a haybale by the tackroom, polishing a bridle, singing softly to himself, with Beowabbit peering over his shoulder like a lovestruck puppy. Legolas' hair was pulled back in a long snakey braid. Dana'd found him a pair of jeans with a better fit, and a big wooly Irish sweater, in greens and browns. And a very cool snowboarder hat, in totally outrageous colors.
"What," Lorien intoned, "is that?"
"It's a snowboarder hat. Cool, huh?"
"It's vomitive. It looks like a refugee from Santa's yard sale."
"No, dude, it's all good! The latest thing. Besides, it worked for Spock."
"What?"
"Classic Star Trek! Every time they went back in time, they had to cover up Spock's pointy ears, so he always wore, like, knitted hats and stuff. It was easier than trying to get them to believe he'd caught his head in a mechanical rice picker."
"Oh. Right."
We ambled over to Legolas. We tried to amble casually, it didn't work very well. It ended up being more like a stampede of starved sharks.
"Suilad!" I said with a big grin. Lorien taught me that. I was really hoping she was right and it actually was a greeting, not your hovercraft is full of eels.
He smiled up at us, then stood, unfolded, flowed up like a cat rising. Beo shoved him in the back in a friendly sort of way, he reached back and scritched Beo between the front legs.
Beowabbit's about seventeen hands of dark bay Warmblood trouble. Beo's owner, Amanda, bought him for an outrageously small amount of cash about a year ago, bought him from a few pictures and a video, of him moving through his gaits on a lunge line...without a rider. She found out why there was no rider in the video. Riders tended to log more air time than a jet pilot. Dana thought he'd just been spoiled by bad trainers. I figured any horse who'd been stuck with the name Beowabbit was just permanently peeved at the entire human race. Amanda couldn't seem to fix the problem and she was softhearted and honest enough to not pass him on to some other greenhorn.
And there he was with his nose in Legolas' back and his eyes half closed like he was in Lothlorien. Well, yeah, this was Legolas; the guy who'd left a perfectly good Rohirrim saddle and bridle lying in the grass in the Middle of Nowhere, Rohan, when he borrowed Arod from them, so he could ride bareback and bridleless through a few battles with an armoured Dwarf bonking around at his back. Bet Tolkien never rode bareback with anyone, especially a Dwarf. A Dwarf in chainmail, no less. With a battleaxe. With two riders bareback, the front rider gets shoved up onto the horse's withers; that's the pointy, mountainous shoulder blade hump at the base of the neck. It's bad enough if you're a girl, never mind a guy. And, uh, yeah, from what I'd seen when he arrived fresh out of his bath, Legolas would have had a serious problem.
"Just go ride for awhile." Dana said, "I've got a couple lessons, you can come back and feed later. Your handsome prince seems to have taken care of the rest."
"Cool." I said. It bent the brain picturing him in Wellies with a manure fork.
"How do you say thank you in Sindarin?" I asked Lorien. I was really hoping she wouldn't tell me to say something like go kiss an orc.
"Hannon le, Legolas Thranduilion." Lorien said. She bowed a little, like a lady before a prince.
I repeated it, a little less fluently. A lot less. He gave me a grave, courteous smile, instead of laughing his butt off like he probably wanted to.
Lorien asked him something, he replied. "He was bored." she said to me and Dana, " And I think he wanted to do something useful, not just be a guest."
Dana shook her head, "You sure you want to send him back?"
We both practically shouted at once;
"YES!"
"NO!"
Lorien glared at me. "I mean yes!" I said. Well, not at all really, but it was what we had to do. I guess. If we had to.
"Go ride. Put Lorien on Pumpkin, I won't need her for the lessons, you take Cherokee."
We both looked at Legolas.
"Tell him, if he can convince that reprobate Beo to work as nicely for Amanda as he did for him earlier, I don't want him cleaning any more stalls."

canad: Legolas
"None of our folk left?" Gimli said, "Has this got to do with that River of Time nonsense?"
"Yes."
"Nevermind. It would take from now till the end of the fifteenth age...what I want to know is how did you get there, and why?"
"Lizard summoned me."
"What, she was some kind of wizard? Lizard the Wizard?"
"No, no, no. Simply a maiden of the Edain. But she had found a spell."
"Like a Hobbit with a magic ring. Sounds like a ceiling of loose rock waiting for a Dwarf with a hasty mining axe."
"As ever, you hit the orc square on the head. Lorien was worried, she kept trying to reassure me that they were trying to find the way to send me back. Lizard seemed not to agree. She spent a lot of time glaring at Lorien and punching her. I could tell they were best of friends."

Three is Company...or Not
We rode out, me in the lead, because I knew the trails. Me on Cherokee, a compact little pinto mustang, wearing just a bosal (sort of a loose, rawhide noseband with no bit...no saddle either, I wanted to impress the Elf), Lorien on Pumpkin behind me, clutching the pommel of her armchair sized western saddle like a Titanic passenger clutching a life preserver. The reins stayed clamped between her hands and the pommel, useless. Good thing Pumpkin didn't care. She was a fat, quiet little mare, bright chestnut with a blond mane...the exact color and pretty much the shape, of a pumpkin, and she didn't care who was on her or what they were doing, as long as her nose was pasted to the tail of the horse in front of her. Legolas sat, bareback, on Beo, the soft cotton rope from the halter draped across Beo's neck. Lorien had managed to convince him it was just too weird for him to have nothing on the horse's head at all.
"Why?" he asked her, "And why did Dana want me to cover up my ears?"
Which is how he found out that here, at least, his people were a vanishing species. Vanished, actually.
Gone.
Well, as far as we knew, at least.
He got a look in his eyes then, like I imagined he had...er...would...did...in the book...when he heard the gulls in the dark, waking the Sea-Longing, and he still had to ride to possible death and destruction to save a world that wasn't his anymore.
I felt awful right then. It was one thing to read about something hurting a character you loved, but to see it on his face.
And know you had something to do with it.
Ow.
Yeah, ok, ok, it's my fault. It's all my fault. I'll put him back, I promise. We ambled on, little birds flew up from the woods' understory, vultures soared overhead on wings held in a shallow V, like the gulls you draw in first grade.
Gulls.
This is southcentral Pennsylvania, "Penn's Woods", like Mirkwood, only with more malls, and smaller spiders. It lies between the Appalachian hills and the Susquehanna River that flows down to the Chesapeake Bay and then down to the sea...
To the sea...
Oh crap ohcrapohcrap! A shadow passed overhead, and I looked up. I hadn't thought of this before, but here, like on the Anduin, the gulls really do fly far inland this time of year. They usually hang out at the malls, raiding dumpsters and picking up leftovers from Happy Meals. It's not exactly as picturesque as those paintings people get at the shore and hang over their sofas, but it's an easy meal for those survival experts.
The Sea-Longing...oh crap, the Sea-Longing!
Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree
in joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea!
If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,
thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.
All we'd need is for our Elf to see one, hear one and blammo, all is lost. We could still send him back but it'd be screwed. He'd have a bad case of Sea-Longing, he'd go around waxing poetic about western sunsets and ocean voyages and undying lands and stuff, and Gollum would stay in Mirkwood, and the Ring would stay with Frodo.
"Legolas!" I practically shouted, I had to distract him, "What's that tree?"

leben: Legolas
"Why did she ask you about a tree in her land?"
"I had no idea. It was very odd. It made me think of how I would suddenly ask my father about a bird, or a plant, when I wished to keep him from asking who had broken the eight hundred year old vase..."

Lizard
Oh, that was bright. He has no idea what you said, and they probably don't have liriodendrons in Middle-earth and you know what it is anyway and he probably knows that you know and...
The shadow passed overhead and it was a hawk. A big redtail, soaring on the thermals.
Lorien twisted in her saddle, unlocking a hand from the pommel in front, to lock it onto the cantle at her butt, a feat of serious bravery for her. "Man galadh tan?" she said to Legolas, smiling, and pointing at my tree. Evil wench.
He looked surprised, looked at the tree, looked at her. Probably wondering why she was asking him about a tree in her world.
She unlocked one hand long enough to pull Pumpkin to a crooked halt.
Legolas nodded, sidepassed Beo right over to the tree. I didn't know Beo could even do that. Legolas put a fine-carved hand out onto the bark. He sat there, on a horse as still as stone for a minute...for five...
...tick...tick...tick...I looked at my watch. Elf and horse hadn't moved. Not a hair. Ten minutes. Pumpkin dropped her head and half closed her eyes. Cherokee stretched his neck, yanking the reins loose enough to reach the grass.
"Never," Lorien said, "Never, never, never ask an Elf a simple question if you want an instant answer. Or have you forgotten? They've got all the time in the world."
"Oh. Yeah. Right." Immortal and all that. Cherokee munched his way across the trail. I didn't bother arguing with him, and threw a leg over his withers, watching Legolas. Even with Pumpkin practically snoring, Lorien clung to the saddle.
...tick...tick...tick...fifteen minutes. If our trees spoke as slow as ents, this could take till the end of the next age.
A squirrel rampaging in the tree above him missed a landing and scrambled, letting loose a small shower of twigs and leaves.
He didn't move.
"You know, I never thought about this as a side-effect of having an Elf...around."
Lorien glared, "You can't have him."
"You can't either."
She made a rude noise at me. She never makes rude noises. Some shred of courage stirred in her, and she thumped Pumpkin on the side with her legs.
"Whump her with your heels, not your calves, she won't pay any attention to your calves."
Lorien whumped and Pumpkin raised her head and moved a single hoof. Lorien clutched the pommel tighter.
"Steer her fergawdsake!"
She unlocked a hand and pulled a rein. Pumpkin, who has better esp than anyone I know, ambled, one foot at a time, over to where Beo stood like a Gettysburg Battlefield monument. Pumpkin stopped, dropped her head and began to eat some weeds. Legolas remained pasted to the tree in some kind of Elvish Jedi-zen.
"Ummm, " I suggested, "Maybe we should go now." Nobody moved. Nobody paid any attention all the times Legolas said that in the movie either.
Lorien was looking up at the tree, "I wish I could do that."
"What? Talk to trees?"
"Yeah. What kind is it, do you know? I mean, you climb them all the time."
"Tulip poplar. Liriodendron is the scientific name.'
"Sounds Elvish."
"I think it's Latin."
"Don't you wish you could talk to them, I mean, when you're way up there, what could they tell you?"
I slid off Cherokee and left him with his nose in the grass along the trail. There wasn't a tree I couldn't climb, and I knew all their names. I knew them by their leaves and by their bare bark in the winter. And what kind of wood was good for what. And I could recognize any kind in any lumber pile, by sight or by smell. But what did I really know about them? I watched Legolas' face for a moment, open-eyed but with his heart and mind walking somewhere on the strange paths of Elvish dreams. I reached out and touched the bark.
It felt like bark. Well, what did I expect, sudden enlightenment?
With a gentle movement, like a bird settling over nestlings, Legolas laid a hand over mine. Warm and real and light as a feather. And strong as steel. As mithril. For a moment I was too startled to think.
Then I stopped thinking.
And for a moment, I was the tree. I felt the dark damp earth, the great web of roots, big as the web of branches overhead, reaching into that earth. The relief and...thankfulness? Could a tree be thankful? Thankfulness for the damp, after a long summer of rock hard dry. Felt the branches reaching into the air, into light. Galad. Light. Galadh. Tree. Reaching, stretching, moving, growing,dancing, time stretching, the blurry scurry of little things like us at its feet. Feet, no feet, trees don't have feet. Or fronts or backs or faces or hands. They just reach, up and down all at the same time, into earth and sky...

eneg: Legolas
"Hasty folk, these Edain. I had barely begun to understand who the tree was when Lizard broke the flow of energy by touching the same tree bole."
"What are you talking about?"
"It is like a stream, the energy flowing through the tree, drop a rock in a stream and what happens?"
"Ah."
The Elf's eyes softened, "But I felt something else then. She very much wanted to know what I was doing. So I showed her."

Lizard
The world snapped back into focus, I blinked and reeled, like something uprooted. A strong arm caught my shoulders, steadied me. He smelled like woods, like Dana's herb pot, like...
Lorien was staring at me from Pumpkin's back. Legolas was saying something soft.
Not romantic, probably something like; silly human, talking to trees is for Elves. I shook my head and looked up through a spiderwork of bare branches. "Whoa!" The tree-top spun slowly and Legolas caught my face in a gentle hand. I stared into his eyes. What the hell color is that anyway? Bluey greeney grey treetwig possumfur silver sycamore bark sun on creek...
"Lizard!"
"Whoa." I looked up at Lorien and the world stopped trying to throw me off. Lorien looked kind of...jealous? "Whoa, I was the tree." I looked up at Legolas, "Hannon le! Hannon le!" I guess I had one of those big stupid grins on my face, like when I took Amanda's best hunter, Spindrift, over my first four foot jump.
Legolas gave me a smile. It was the kind of smile he gave Gimli in the movie, when he found out about Galadriel's gift. Sweet and warm and beautiful. A buddy smile. Except this was a different face.
But the same smile.
"No problem." he said quite clearly.
"Huh?"
He looked up at Lorien and asked something in Sindarin. She nodded.
"What!" I demanded.
"He was making sure that was the right response."
"English! He speaks English!"
"Looks like he learns fast." She clutched the pommel again with both hands and struggled a leg over Pumpkin's butt. She dropped onto the ground, left foot still stuck in the stirrup. She did a little newbie dance and got herself untangled, let the reins drop to the ground and came over to us. She caught Legolas' arm and said something.
"Al na'galadh." he said gently. He said some more, but I only recognized the tree word. And the look on Lorien's face. Total disappointment.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." she went back to Pumpkin and wrestled a foot into the stirrup, Pumpkin's nose was in the weeds, chowing down, the reins somewhere under her foot. I started to open my mouth to tell her to stop being such a stupid newbie and pick up her reins before Pumpkin broke them. Legolas went to Pumpkin, touched her neck. She moved her foot off the reins, raised her head. He picked them up and handed them to Lorien and helped her get back in the saddle. She blushed practically purple.
I sat on Cherokee looking like a bass swallowing a fly while our Elf showed her how to hold the reins, how to sit, how to steer and basically all the stuff I already showed her except it had run right off like water on rock.
Every few strides down the trail she seemed to need a refresher course. He didn't seem to mind obliging.

odog: Legolas
"Why did you not show the other how to talk to trees, then?"
"It was not her gift. Lizard had some empathy with trees, and horses, and other living things. And it spun even her like a maelstrom. But Lorien was so disappointed...ai, ai...so I helped her with the horse. That pleased her more than bright jewels have pleased many a fine lady."
"Hmmmph. If that idiot grin on your face means anything, I'd begin to think those fair young maidens were playing your heartstrings like..."
"An electric guitar."
"What?"
"Nevermind."

Something Draws Near...
(...but I'm too busy flirting to feel it...)
Nightfall, Thursday: Lizard
The sun had fallen behind the grey hills by 4:30, some pink light still hung in the sky, but the treeshadow on the trail was dark. I knew the trails, so did the horses, and they were night-sighted. I wasn't worried, even with Newbie Lass, but I turned us around anyway. Lorien seemed to have finally gotten the hang of sitting and holding the reins right and actually guiding her horse instead of letting her just follow me. Although she kept letting Pumpkin plod. Which let Beo's longer stride put him beside her on the wider parts of the trail.
I just hate her sometimes.
We came out of pines down a long hill under trees with a last shred of leaf on them. An icy breeze was in our faces now, so we picked up the pace a little. The deep booming voice of a great horned owl sounded from the field edges ahead of us.
Lorien gave a start and pulled her parka tighter around her. From somewhere behind me, someone started singing, low, soft, like nightwind.
Well it sure wasn't Lorien.
The pink faded from the sky and the world went all blue and icy. And out of the blue dark came a rider. I blinked and pulled Cherokee up. There a few hundred yards ahead of us, where the trail wound around the edge of a cornfield, was a Black Rider.
Pumpkin plowed to a halt, her nose in Cherokee's tail. I turned to Lorien, "Do you see that?" I was kind of hoping she didn't. I was kind of hoping it was a really big buck and a lot of imagination.
"The radio tower, the cornfield, or the Black Rider?" She did not sound at all scared. Her expression looked like a parent who's just been told there's a monster in the closet.
"Um, yeah." I looked at Legolas, and felt a whole lot better. I did remember he'd shot one down in the book. Then I remembered he didn't have a bow right now.
Lorien whispered something to him.
He laughed, a light, clear sound in the dark.
Lorien whumped Pumpkin up beside me and punched me square in the shoulder. "Mustardbrains, it's some lady on a black horse. All bundled up, like us."
Oh. Yeah, right. If you have an Elf in the party, it would be wise to ask him what the mystery blur in the distance really is.
We rode on, Legolas singing softly behind us.
And the black rider rode toward us. Something tingled at the back of my neck. Like when I just know the horse is going to stop before a jump. Most of the riders in our barn were kids, except for a few boarders, none of whom rode out on trails in the dark and cold. And there were no other big dark horses like that in our stable. Or anywhere within ten miles. Where was she from, and what was she doing on our trail?
I pulled Cherokee to a stop. "Maybe we ought to go the other way." I suggested. I looked back at Legolas. What happened to"...something draws near, I can feel it..." Maybe it was all in my head, maybe...
Legolas was on the ground, throwing Lorien up on Beo, lashing Pumpkin's reins around the saddle horn, and leaping on Beo behind Lorien. "Noro!" he hissed, and Cherokee spun under me like a cutting horse, thundering back up the trail with Pumpkin's nose pasted to his tail. I heard Beo's long, light stride right behind her. I needed no translation. Somewhere behind me I heard a blast of sound, like a wizard's fireball going off. I glanced back and saw the treeline behind us ablaze with light.

tolodh: Legolas
"Just a woman on a great black horse, the sort of horse that is strong, rather than fast. No whiff of evil or darkness. Yet, I did not expect evil in that place. Lorien had told me all the orcs and wargs were long vanished. And if there were Dark Lords left, they were only human. Yet Lorien was afraid in the dark, afraid of the owl's voice, afraid of the nightwind. So I sang a song to ease her heart. And in singing the song, I did not read the black rider's intent. Not till Lizard slowed her horse as if she had felt something. Not till the rider uncloaked, and revealed her power."
"What was she?"
"That I did not know. Not like a Nazgul or a wizard, not like any of the powers I have known. And hunger, great hunger, like the lust of Ungoliant for light. Only not so great. But great enough to do us harm."

Lizard
A dark trail is a bad place for a gallop, but at least the horses knew this one, and I knew the low branchy places well enough to stay plastered to Cherokee's neck. The horses slowed to a walk after a mile or so and half a dozen twisting turnoffs. Pumpkin's thick pony coat was wet with sweat, so was Cherokee's mustang coat, long as a winter buffalo's. Beo was barely breathing hard. Lorien was breathing kind of hard, but she didn't look too scared. Of course not...she'd been wrapped in Legolas' protective grip for the last couple of minutes.
Lorien was holding a whispered conversation with Legolas. We rode on, at a walk, in a direction I knew would take us back to the barn. "What was that thing?" I asked.
"He doesn't know, it's just like, all of a sudden she...uncloaked. Like you could feel her power. He says you felt it too. At the same time."
Whoa.
"Is she from his world?"
"I don't know. But she knew we were there, and she was looking for us."

Where No Elf Has Gone Before
(But Captain...that's not logical)
Lizard
Dana was waiting for us, the Jeep was parked in front of the barn, covered with a fresh layer of mud, Dana's shotgun in the rack, Shenzi leering at us toothily from the back seat. Dana looked us over, then took a closer look at the horses. They were fine, despite their hard run in the dark. Together we untacked them and groomed them down. And told her what happened. I figured, from the look of the Jeep, that somehow, she already knew.
Dana told us her tale, Lorien translated to Legolas. As usual.
"I went up the trail to Myers' cornfield, and Shenzi just went ballistic. Turned on my spotlight and there was this chick about a hundred feet off, on the biggest damn black horse I ever saw. Bigger than Beo, I think, ditzing around like he just wanted to ditch his rider. Nasty aura, on the chick. Rotten seat, too. Bouncing around like she'd never been on a horse before. She was headed away from me, up the trail to where you must have been, but the way she was sitting that horse she wasn't getting very far very fast." Dana almost smiled. "Most horses don't like the sound of a shotgun." The smile grew, "Hers sure didn't."
"Long walk home?" I asked.
Dana looked like Shenzi, "Yep. She just vanished. Not that I really wanted to face her without more... ammunition." And she wasn't talking about the shotgun. Her eyes went to Legolas. "I can't imagine that either of you have PO'd anyone at school enough to send out something that felt like her. Come to think of it, no one at your school would know where to find something like her."
"What's that? Some kinda' undead, like the Nazgul or something?"
Legolas gave me a sharp look, startled. He turned and spoke with Lorien.
"No, he knows their evil, from the stories of his people, from the shadow that lies on Mirkwood." Lorien said.
Dana nodded, "I'm pretty sure this one's human. And that may be even scarier."
"What would she want with any of us?" I asked.
"Can't imagine. But there's one thing that's changed in the last couple of days." She eyed our Elf again.
"She has to be from his world, nobody here knows about him but us. He's not in the story anymore." Lorien said.
Something clicked in my brain, like when I realize there's a big gaping plothole in a movie I'm watching.
Lorien seemed to be driving the same road, because she saw the same plothole, "If he's axed from The Book, why do we remember him?" she said.
We stared at each other for a short eternity. Legolas edged forward, as if he was trying to read our thoughts. Lorien caught hold of his arm as if she thought he'd vanish in a puff of logic.
It was the plothole that finally vanished in a puff of logic. Vulcan logic, to be precise. "McCoy." I said.
Dana and Lorien looked at me like I'd lost it. "City at the Edge of Forever."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Lorien said.
Lorien never says hell.
"Classic Trek," I explained. "The Enterprise beams a bunch of its most important people down to an unknown planet full of potential brain-sucking aliens, like they always do, and McCoy falls through some sort of time portal and messes up the past and the Enterprise vanishes. The crew on the planet do not vanish, probably because the writers needed somebody to go back in time and fix what McCoy messed up. Or maybe it's because they were in the sphere of influence of the portal, so they stayed the way they always were."
"Whooo, sphere of influence, our vocabulary is growing."
I gave Lorien a Shenzi grin.
Lorien glowered back. "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard." she said. "What does a time portal have to do with Elves in York County?"
"Whoa, girls. I think you're on to something Liz. Sphere of influence...the spell. I handled it, you used it," then she frowned at Lorien, "wait..."
"Well, she wasn't there, but I sorta involved her. I mean, I did it for both of us. There was this part of the spell, where you were supposed to put something of yours into the fire...I threw in my scarf, the itchy icky pink one my grandma gave me, and one of Lorien's mittens..."
"My mittens? My hand knitted wool mittens that I left in your truck and I only ever found the one? Those were made by Native Tribes in the mountains of Chile! I can't believe..."
"Hey, I thought it was a pretty good tradeoff for an Elf...I mean I didn't know at the time it was an Elf but..."
"Girls!" It was Dana's schoolhorse voice, the one that made even Pumpkin pay attention. "I need you both here. Working together on this. Liz's explanation makes as much sense as any of the rest of this. But what's important right now is to find out who this chick on the horse is, and what she's got to do with this. And then get Legolas back to Mirkwood where he belongs." she turned to him, "Come." She rose and headed out of the barn.
"Tolo." Lorien said, following Dana. We trailed after them, the Elf and me. Back up to Dana's house, and the Museum Room. It was like a museum crammed into one room. If you looked long enough, you could probably find anything in there. Stuff hung from the ceiling, and the walls were bookshelves, and bookshelves filled the rest of it with little tiny aisles between. And a lot of the shelves held other things than books; pottery and pewter, dolls and old toys, a gun cabinet, an antique saddle, a whole carousel horse, a viking shield, a chainmail shirt...
...and a bow. A mooncurve of golden wood no longer than Legolas' arm. It was tucked into a buckskin sheath, with a fat quiver of arrows bundled with it. Dana took it down from the rafters and handed it to him. "If the book was correct, you're pretty good with these. I think you'll need them."
He accepted them with a courteous bow.
Lorien gave me a look that said, 'what the hell?' She leaned over and whispered to me, "Why is she giving him a kid's bow?"
"It's not a kid's toy." I said, "She made it herself, years ago. It's a buffalo bow, a horseman's bow. I tried to draw it once...wahzoo, l think it's got like a seventy pound pull or something! The arrows are matched to it. And it's a lot easier to carry around than the Great Bow of Galadriel."
The golden buckskin was free of any decoration except the natural ragged edge of the leather, like a line of mountains against the sky. Legolas drew out the bow, ran his hands along it, with that unreadable hawk expression on his face. He unwound the string, strung the bow. He did it in a heartbeat, like he'd done it a million times. He probably had, literally millions of times in hundreds of years. He drew the bowstring back slowly.
His eyes brightened, his mouth stretched in a smile. It reminded me a little of Shenzi.
I was really glad he was on our side.
"Oh. Dana added, "You might find these useful too." she gestured toward a pair of knives sheathed and hung from the edge of a shelf. She unsheathed them in a fluid motion, they circled in her hands like hawks and froze, hilts an inch from his hands. He took them with a nod and a grave smile.
I stood with my mouth open like a bass. "Those are Legolas' movie knives!"
Dana grinnned her Shenzi grin.
"How? Everything else got changed!" Lorien squeaked.
Dana's eyes flicked once around the Museum Room, "And in Lothlorien, the moon doesn't change the same way it does everywhere else."
We went back to the kitchen, Dana pointed me to the cupboard, "Get some chocolate for everyone, will you, I'll be right back."
Fifteen minutes later she reappeared with three small leather pouches on hide strings, something that looked like fat magic markers, and a really big stick. She held out the bags, one to Lorien, one to me, one to Legolas; "Protection." she said. "It's not perfect, it won't keep you out of detention," she eyed me, "it won't keep your parents from grounding you, and if you go snowboarding without a helmet on the Death Slope, you're on your own. But it will make it very hard for this...lady, " she said lady with her teeth showing a little, like Shenzi, "to see you. You're all probably safe on the farm here, there are...protections...around the perimeter, and I can do more. And there's Shenzi."
Lorien nodded gravely, then held up her bag frowning, "It's leather." she whispered loudly.
I punched her with my elbow. "Of course it is, banana butt."
"I'm a vegetarian."
"You're not supposed to eat it."
She gave me a look that said 'die the death of ten thousand screams'. I hung it around her neck, like mine. Legolas looped his around his own neck with a grave expression. He nodded a thank you to Dana.
Dana handed each of us the magic markers. Not magic markers.
"Pepper spray." she said, "It'll stop a grizzly bear." She handed one to Legolas too. "Explain to him it might be better to use this if he's anywhere near civilization."
That left the really big stick, six feet long, smooth and tapered slightly to each end. Dana handed it to me. "Everything you need to know right now is in the routines you learned."
"What's that?" Lorien wanted to know.
"Bo staff. A Japanese version of the buck and a quarter quarterstaff."
"Huh?"
"It's a really big stick and you hit people with it." Pacifist parents leave you so deprived. They could have at least bought her a few violent video games or something.
"Oh." she said. She examined her pepper spray and began flipping the lid.
"No, no no, point it this way!" I grabbed it and saved us all from a fate worse than roadkill skunk. "I'll show you outside, later."
Dana regarded both of us with eyes that made me think of a wolf, a wise old pack leader. "Stay together you two, when you're not at home. Be watchful, be wary. You especially, Liz, you smelled her before the Elf."
We nodded, in unison.
"Ok, go home, get some sleep. See you tomorrow morning." She looked at Legolas, "We have a loose horse to round up." She didn't ask Lorien to stay and translate.

neder: Legolas
"You went out in the middle of the night, a cold, dark night, to find a horse?" Gimli said. He was still wedged against the goose shelter on deck.
"Honk!" commented one of the geese, and gave him a nip.
Legolas moved, and cradled the goose under one arm, quieting it.
Gimli eyed it, wondering how many plates it would fill.
Legolas continued, "In that world, there were many dangers for a horse loose in the night."
"I thought you said the orcs and wargs were gone."
"Yes, but I felt Dana's worry for the horse, and I learned later why; the swift carriages were many and could collide with a horse and kill it. And there were fences of wire to trap one, and a great forest to lose one in. And if we had the horse, we had a path that led to the Sorceress."
"You could have just tracked her."
"We did. She covered her trail well. Too well. The horse was easy to find."

The Scouring of the Shire
(or, you can clean that stall...)
Lizard
Friday morning, when I came to do my usual feeding chores, Lorien came with me. Partly because of Dana's warning to stay together, but mostly to see the Elf. Not that the thought of seeing Legolas made it any easier to pry her out of bed. Her mom just smiled sweetly at me from her place in her studio, where she was sipping some sort of herb tea and easing into the day. She didn't yell at Lorien to hurry the hell up or anything. I don't think she ever yelled. Or maybe she was just glad to have someone else do it for a change.
I dragged Lorien, still juggling three books, her half full pack, two vegetarian sandwiches and her pepper spray, to the truck, and stuffed her into the passenger seat. She rode all the way to the stable with her nose pasted to the window. I could tell she was worried by the way she didn't complain about the bucking horse ride of the truck.
"She wouldn't be on the horse now." I said. "She's probably in a Porsche or something."
"Maybe the hospital." Lorien suggested, "Maybe we should start looking there."
"Dana went out last night, after we left, with Legolas. Maybe they found something."
They had, and it filled the end stall. The biggest damn horse I ever saw. Black with white up to his fetlocks on three feet, and a splash of white on his nose. We stood, clustered around his open stall door, while he tried to eat Legolas' braid.
"What is that?" Lorien said in awe.
Whatever it was, it made Beowabbit look like a pony. It stood a good hand and a half taller than Beo's 17 hands, and for reference, a 15 hand horse is average, which makes Beo huge. It was not built with Beo's light, athletic lines, but with big heavy bone, and feet the size of Rohan warshields, a true draft horse. "Shire, maybe?" I suggested.
Dana nodded in agreement.
"What? What do you mean 'Shire'? It doesn't look like anything remotely Hobbity!" Lorien squeaked.
"Shires are the biggest of the draft horses. Sorta like Clydesdales. Except Clydesdales compared to Shires are kinda like Gimli compared to Boromir."
"Not a common breed around here." Dana said. "Shouldn't be too hard to figure out where he came from. I'll start calling around. Somebody should know somebody who knows who's got a Shire or two."
"Yeah," Lorien said, "they'd be kind of hard to hide."
"Is that the tack that was on him?" I asked.
"Yeah, nice stuff, and sized for him. But that chick couldn't ride for crap. Wonder if she borrowed him, or rented?" Dana said.
"Nobody'd rent a horse out that late." I said.
"Stole, I bet." Dana added.
"Why not ask the horse." Lorien said.
We both looked at her like she'd lost it. She gestured toward Legolas.
"Can he do that?" Dana asked.
"I dunno." I said. I thought about the tree thing. About Arod refusing to go into the Paths of the Dead...until Legolas sang to him.
"In the Hobbit it says how the Elves of Mirkwood would get messages from the birds that loved them." Lorien added. "And Beleg Cuthalion could talk to the forest animals."
"Who?" I said.
"Hot Elven ranger. Read the Silmarillion."
"That's harder to read than my math book. And about as exciting."
"Was it not you who said the difficult horse is usually the most interesting?"
I hate it when I can't think of a snappy comeback to the Zen of Lorien.
Legolas came out from under the black horse's heavy mane to find three women staring at him. He looked from one to the other of us, like an elk surrounded by wolves. He cocked one beautiful eyebrow in a question mark.
"Tell him, Lorien." Dana said.
Lorien explained what we needed. I watched his face for any hint of an expression that said, ''is your brain full of weasels?' His face stayed calm, but focused, like a hawk.
He said something to Lorien, something rolling and fluid like the light canter of a good hunter. He nodded at Dana. He stood before the great black horse, face pressed against the horse's face, a hand on each side of the huge head, the great thick forelock flowing into Legolas' own hair, black on treeshadow. They stood for a minute, for awhile.
...tick...tick...tick...
"Uh," I said, it occured to me we still needed to go to school. It occured to me that Elves probably didn't have anything like formal schools with bells and attendance and Mrs. Smeed. It occured to me we still needed Lorien to translate. "This could take awhile."
Dana looked at her watch.
"You could write us an excuse." Lorien suggested.
"I seem to remember something from the book," Dana said, "something about Elvish memories. You don't live for thousands of years and forget those years. The translation will wait till you get back from school."
I don't know who dragged their feet more getting out of the barn, me or Lorien. I wanted to stand next to Legolas and the horse for the rest of the day. I wanted him to put his hand over mine on that great silky neck and show me what it was like to be the horse.

pae: Legolas
"And what," Gimli asked, "could you learn from a horse?"
"Much, if you listen. But they do not think like my folk..." he gave the Dwarf a long thoughtful look, "like any of the speaking peoples. Their memories are sharp and clear, full of sight and sound and smell and motion, and full of their own words, though their words are few. And they do not see many colors; their world is like a painting in only a few inks..."

Flight of the Ford
Friday evening: Lizard
"But what color was the truck?" Lorien repeated in English.
Legolas shook his head. "I know...not."
"It's a horse," I said, "he doesn't see in color."
"A few limited colors, but scientists are still working on that one." Dana said.
"Well, this truck wasn't any of those." I said.
"Light? Dark?" Lorien repeated it in Elvish; "Donn? Lim, gael, gwind, maedh, malu?"
Legolas looked around the kitchen, then rose and touched one of Dana's books, "Light."
Mostly the horse had seen the inside of a horse trailer. Legolas had backtracked him, both from the enormous hoofprints on the trail, and the pictures pulled from his memory to a parking lot in the State Forest. From there, it was a few miles of trails, field edges and a dirt road to Dana's. Legolas made a scrawling motion with one hand, the left one, I noticed.
"Paper." I said.
Lorien repeated it in Elvish, with a questionmark at the end of it.
"Paper." he said.
I rooted through the mess on Dana's microwave and produced a pencil and a largeish piece of scrap paper, and handed it to the Elf.
He doodled on it for a minute or two and held up a remarkably detailed rendering of a dual-axled pickup truck and a monster gooseneck trailer, from the point of view of a horse tied to its usual place on the side of the trailer. Detailed right down to the swooshy graphic on the side of the trailer, and the Ford logo sprawled across the truck's window.
I stared at it in disbelief. I looked at Lorien, "I didn't know he could do that."
"He's how old?" she said, "What, you think he spent all his time wandering around in the woods talking to trees?"
"No, I thought he spent it learning to shoot orcs, and tightrope walk on troll chains and surf down stairways and demolish oliphaunts."
"Pop culture lemming."
"Book geek...and being a passable illustrator is not even in The Book!"
"Hey," Dana said, "I can read the license plate."

minig: Legolas
"What is a license plate?" Gimli said.
"It is like the runes on a sword. Unique for each car. Most of the time they are a collection of letters and numbers, meaning nothing."
"Why would anyone put meaningless runes on something they had crafted? Runes should tell the tale of the thing, its history, runes speak of the magic forged into it..."
"These runes do tell a tale in a way, in a mysterious fortress called the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, there are records of the history of each carriage, and you can find these by the runes."
"Well, now that is more like it. But why not have the runes themselves say something?"
"Sometimes they do."

Lizard
"EVL WMN...isn't she being a little obvious?" I said.
"Maybe it's a red herring." Lorien said.
"What?"
"Like introducing us to Glorfindel, then sending Legolas with the Fellowship. You think it's going to be one thing, and then it's another."
"I dunno, Legolas thought she was pretty evil." I said.
"Maybe it's not her truck, or maybe it's a fake plate, in case someone saw her." Lorien scrunched her eyebrows till she looked like Elrond.
"I doubt anyone who rode like that would have a truck capable of pulling a horse trailer, much less one rigged up for a Shire! Still, I think I'll run this past a buddy of mine, he's married to a cop." Dana said. "If nothing else, it might lead us to the horse's owner faster."
"What about before the truck, what did our horse see before he got loaded in the truck?" I gave Lorien a Meaningful Look, and handed Legolas another piece of paper. While Dana tracked down the license, real or otherwise, we would find the barn.
We were rattling down the eleventy-second potholey backroad, Strider's stereo cranking out the Grateful Dead...one of the few things Lorien and I could agree on. Legolas was scanning the horizon, sandwiched between us, like the filling in a Keebler Elf cookie. Lorien sat on the passenger side, clutching a sketch Legolas had done from his conversation with the horse. She was supposed to be scanning the closer bits of landscape out her window, iffy even with her glasses, but mostly she seemed to be scanning Legolas. He was kind of nodding and humming to the Dead, he'd liked them better than anything else I'd played so far, and Lorien thought it was funny that an immortal would like the Dead.
He'd stared at the CDs for the longest time at first, wiggling them and turning them around and playing with the rainbow effects. He looked just like my little cousin at Christmas. Then I'd chucked one in and turned it up and he'd ricocheted off the roof with that "Aiii, a balrog!" look on his face, reaching for a non-existent arrow. It took Lorien awhile to explain car stereos, there weren't exactly a lot of words in Elvish to describe things like woofers and tweeters and amps.
He made us stop three times so he could look under the hood for the tiny little band.

uiug: Legolas
Gimli stared at the runes drawn with a wet finger on the deck before him, "C...D...They put meaningless runes on everything? Or does C and D mean something to them? What does it have to do with music? And what kind of strange magic can make music come from a flattened disk of metal with rainbows trapped in it? And why did you not..."
Legolas shook his head, laughing, "I am sorry, mellon nin, that I could not bring you one, for trying to understand it would have certainly taken your mind off the rolling of the sea and of your stomach! But I doubt even the mightiest of the Dwarf Craftsmen could have understood this strange magic of the Edain. I made them stop so I could look inside the heart of the carriage...truck they called it..." he paused, a gentle smile on his face, " Lizard named it Strider."
"Our Strider?" the Dwarf said in astonishment.
"Yes, ours."
"That's preposterous! Naming a carriage after a king!"
"Well, all of that kind were called athrad, Ford in their tongue, after the man who invented them."
"Hmmph! Strange folk indeed. Are you sure there was not some trace of orc blood in them?"
Legolas laughed, "No! Maybe Dwarf. Yes, definitely Dwarf. Many of the folk of that land were stout and bearded and loved to build and repair things. And they loved ale and red meat off the bone!" His voice dropped into an approximation of Gimli's gravelly baritone. "But, the truck," Legolas went on, "under its hood there were metal boxes and wires, and an awful stench, and a great horrible noise, and the whole contraption shuddered like a chained warg, but there was no hint of how the music was made. Not under the hood, certainly!
"And," he continued, "the CD was not metal, but some strange thing called plastic. Many things in their world seemed to be made of plastic. Lorien always made a face when she said the word though, as if it was some kind of inferior material. But it was everywhere; hard as metal, soft as wool, clear as glass, tough as leather, in every color of the rainbow, and some colors never seen by the eyes of Man, Elf or Dwarf! Not even by a wizard, I think!"
"Did they mine it? Hunt it? Grow it on trees?"
"I do not know." Legolas frowned, "Though, at the mall, there were plastic trees..."

Lizard
Strider ba-dumped over a couple more potholes Penn-DOT had missed, Lorien's nose made a puppy smear on the window, Legolas' long chiseled fingers made a light rhythm on the dash. This was nice...really nice. I almost forgot what we were really out here for. Even with my eyes peeled to the road, and to the landscape out my side window, I could hear Legolas' soft, low voice, like the murmur of a river in the distance. Hmmmm mmmm hmmmm, and every now and again a word from the song. His shoulder pressed against mine, solid as a tree, even through his mountain parka, and mine, and one jean-clad thigh was warm against mine.
Yeah, well, there's not a lot of room in a truck cab, and Lorien was pretty much in the same sad state I was, plastered against the Elf. What torture. Oh help save me do.
Whatever he thought of the situation, he wasn't telling us.
"Lizard! There!"
There are four people in the known universe who can call me that. Ok, five now.I looked to where he was pointing and caught a glimpse of perfect white fence; the kind of expensive high-tech plastic stuff you never need to paint. Big old trees, and a lane vanishing into the woods. A sign, a big, carved flashy one.
"Whoa!" I screeed to a halt, Lorien lurched and grabbed our Elf for support. I repeat; our Elf.
"Is that it?" I asked.
Lorien repeated it in Elvish.
"Yes." he said.
I spun Strider around in the middle of the road. It took awhile, it' s a truck. And the stickshift is in the middle of the floor, somewhere between our Elf's knees. I had to be careful not to damage him.
"I'm sure they know we're coming by now." Lorien said through clenched teeth, still clutching our Elf, instead of the dash, like usual.
I sat, Strider pointing the wrong way in the wrong lane.
"Last time I looked this was America, not England." Lorien said.
"I'm thinking."
"I thought I smelled something burning."
"Do you want to just waltz up to the door and get zapped by the Nazgul Queen, or what?"
"We have an Elf, remember?"
"Who, apparently, is her prey item of choice, this week. Or can he, like, throw fireballs or bamf or something? Something you may have learned in all your long conversations with him?"
"He can tell a sparrow from a finch a league away." Lorien said smugly. "It's in The Book."
Geek fangirl. I looked at the long lane, I looked at the low hill rising behind it, well behind it. I looked at the bare trees. I looked at the firs up on the hill. I smiled. Kinda' like Shenzi. "We can hike up there, and scout out the place without anyone having a clue we're there."
I drove past the end of the lane again, read the sign; Classic Carriages; for memorable was a picture of a draft horse and Cinderella carriage carved and painted below the carved and painted words. EVL WMN was rich.
Yeah, but she didn't have an Elf.
I found a wide place in the shoulder of the road a hundred yards down from the lane and parked. We piled out and Legolas reached for the bow and quiver hanging in the shotgun rack. I frowned: he'd tried it out and knew it was a short distance weapon, though one powerful enough to bring down a buffalo. Not much use from the top of the hill...unless he was planning to get closer.
Lorien was babbling at him in frantic Elvish.
He said something back, short and sharp as falcon talons. Lorien gave me a look that said help! "Even if she is the Nazgul Queen, we can't just shoot her!" she squeaked.
Yeah, actually it would be a little hard to explain to the cops; 'uh, we thought it was a deer...' nevermind it was wearing high-heeled boots and too much lipstick. "Ummm, maybe you better just stick with the pepper spray this time." I told him. I heard Lorien saying something in Elvish. I reached for the bow.
His hand tightened like a Great Horned Owl on prey. His eyes paled from twilight grey up the scale into green-right-before-a-tornado.
"Uh." I said. I gave Lorien a desperate look. She babbled something else. I looked back into tornado-green eyes; eyes that belonged to a deadly warrior with hundreds of years of experience killing the kinds of things that inhabited my worst nightmares. Eyes old, wise and deep as the great green Hole in the quarry my aunt took me snorkeling in. As ancient as tree roots. There was nothing in those eyes that was even remotely cute, nothing that would have inspired The Santa Clause 3.
Then somewhere in the back of my head I heard a voice, and it sounded just like Gandalf; Dangerous! And so am I...And Aragorn is dangerous and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli Son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself..." Yeah, dangerous myself. I straightened up and stared right back, maybe I wasn't five hundred years old, but this was my woods, my culture, and you couldn't just run around zapping people with arrows, even if they were the Queen of the Nazgul. Even if you were the bloomin' Son of the King of All the Elves of Northern Mirkwood. "You just can't take the bow this time." I said, never breaking contact with his eyes. It was like diving into that great green quarry hole, eerie and alien and cold. Or like looking into the space between the stars. There was stuff there I'd never understand, even if I had a thousand years to try. I made myself keep looking, the way I made myself get back on Spindrift after I went over a jump and he didn't.
The green softened, turned to something like light through new leaves. He tilted his head slightly, and his eyes held a look of surprise and wonder. He closed his eyes in a slow blink, and touched my face, like a hawk's wing, and his eyes were sea-grey again. He half turned and said something to Lorien. Then he nodded to me, almost a courtly bow, and hung the bow back on the rack.
We only had an hour or so of light, so we moved up fast through the trees. Legolas moved fast anyway; light and silent and fast, just like I always imagined. He moved like a hunting cat. It made me think of Bagheera in the Jungle Book...the Kipling book, not the Disney cartoon. The black leopard who could bring down a bull with a swipe of his paw. I didn't have too much trouble keeping up, I've been running around in the woods since I could walk. Or maybe he was just going slower than he could.
Lorien on the other hand...
She slogged. She stumbled. She swore at rocks. Lorien never swears. Then she swore at a particularly big twisty tree root...from her place on her butt on the damp cold rocky ground...and Legolas turned and stared at her. He looked like a devout Catholic who's just heard somebody swear in mass. Lorien glared up at him for a moment, then dropped her eyes. He came back and offered her a hand. "Lighter." he said, sounding just like Dana in a lesson. "Watch." he pointed at himself, then me.
Me.
I felt warm all over.
Lorien nodded, almost teary-eyed.
We crunched the rest of the way up the hill. The woods were dead quiet, as if they were wrapped in a heavy winter blanket. Behind us, the sun was going down all icy and green and yellow and silver. The slope below us was in shadow, the hill across still blazed with a wash of gold. The farm lay between in a hollow already full of dark. I tried to remember if Legolas could see in the dark. Or maybe that was just D&D Elves and the odd pointy-eared blue X-man. I asked Lorien.
"Ummm..." she said. I noticed she didn't ask him. "Yeah, I remember a line from somewhere; "Legolas Greenleaf whose eyes were like cats' for the dark."
"Good."
We slunk into a little grove of cedars. Lorien's greens and greys made her hard to see, even from where I stood. I'd pulled out all my camo stuff on purpose for this, so I guess I would be pretty hard to see from the farm.
Legolas on the other hand...
...you could have spotted him from the space station with that red mountain parka. It was, after all, designed for rescuers to find lost mountaineers. The snowboarding hat didn't help either. He looked at us, noted our pointed stares, looked down at his parka, and took it off. And the hat. The greens and browns of the Irish wool sweater and the stone-blues of the washed out jeans worked a lot better. I turned away from him for a minute, to peer down into the hollow, and when I looked back again he was gone.
"Hey..." I said.
"Here." a soft voice said from somewhere above me.
We settled in and watched.
And watched and watched and watched.
"I'm cold." Lorien said.
"Weenie. Walk around or something."
I heard a lot of crunching from her tree. And slipping, and sliding. A muffled voice muttering "mustard balls." More crunching.
"They're going to hear you all the way down at the farm." I said.
"Squirrels." a voice said from the tree above me. I think it was tinged with laughter.
"Big squirrels." I agreed. But even a normal grey squirrel in the woods sounded like a loose moose.
We watched. We watched a stocky middle-aged guy pull up in a Volvo, and go into the barn. We watched a couple of medium sized draft horses come out of some trees in one pasture and head for the barn. We watched the wash of sun-gold creep up the far hill till it only touched the tree-tops.
No EVL WMN in sight.
"I just remembered something." Lorien said from under her tree.
I looked over, she was doing some kind of weird zen of tai-chi thing, hands together as if she was holding a big invisible ball. She said something in Elvish, or Chinese, or Japanese or something.
"What...are you doing?"
"I'm imagining fire."
"How about imagining some hot chocolate."
She snorted. "Nerd."
"So, what did you remember?"
"It was a different Legolas Greenleaf."
"Huh?"
"Huh?" came a voice from overhead.
"It's not important." I called up to him.
"U-ndae rin!" Lorien called.
"What are you talking about?" I said to Lorien.
"The one who could see in the dark. It was a different Legolas, a Noldorin one, in the Fall of Gondolin. Ours actually said 'would that this night would end and I could have better light for shooting'."
I hate it when she does that. And whatthehell did she mean mouldering one?
"Helm's Deep, Two Towers." she sounded really smug.
I really really hate it when she does that. "Soooooo, you're saying an Elf on this hilltop is going to be pretty useless," I looked up at the dark hill across from us, not even the tips of the topmost trees were tinged with gold anymore, "right about now."
"Yep."
My tree moved slightly, there was a light thhht, like cat feet, and Legolas stood beside me peering down into the hollow. He was squinting. Not an expression I ever expected to see on Mr. I Can Tell A Sparrow From A Finch A League Away. The farm below us was dark, except for one small light at the barn door, and a spattering of Christmas lights wound around something on the porch. The rest of the place was shadowy with bushes and trees.
"You'd think they'd have a big security light or something." Lorien said.
"Some people like night to really be night. And sometimes those lights screw up horses hormones and stuff."
"Evil likes the dark." Lorien intoned.
"So do Elves."
Lorien was silent for so long I figured she'd fallen asleep, or frozen to her tree. Then I heard a great crash-crunching of brush and saw a shadow vanishing downslope toward the barn.
"What the...?" I said.
A shadow moved beside me, a hand caught my arm, "Hand gallop!" he said. He'd been watching Dana's lessons I guess. He vanished downslope ahead of me. I didn't need an invitation, I had no idea what Lorien was up to, but we were probably gonna have to pull her sorry butt out of it. At least she was easy to follow, she sounded like a moose. Three of them.
Legolas took a less direct route, one that included trees and shrubbery; cover. We zigzagged down the hill like fleeing rabbits, got to the fenceline.
Bright white fence, it practically glowed in the dark, making silhouettes out of us.
Legolas ducked past it, melted into a line of blue spruce and lilac bushes and forsythia marching neatly along the driveway. I followed him past a trailer and truck, pale in the dark, with a license that said EVL WMN. We lurked in the shadows twenty yards from the door. We could see Lorien as a shadow in the candle-glow of a straggle of Christmas lights wound around one of those tall fake birdboxes Martha Stewart types like to decorate their porches with. I looked at Legolas, raised an eyebrow in a question mark. His face was calm as a hawk's, but his eyes...they were picking up a lot of light, more light than they possibly could from those little Christmas lights, and they looked worried. He twirled something in his hand, the way he did his knives in the movie...I recognized Dana's Plus Five Pepper Spray of Black Rider Repulsion. Yeah, I had mine ready too.
A short middle aged woman stood in the doorway, round and cheerful faced as a Hobbit. A big black Newfoundland was slobbering on Lorien's coat, a big cheerful doggy grin on his face.
Lorien was chattering away at her as if EVL Hobbit WMN was her grandmother. If Lorien was terrified, it didn't show.
I looked at Legolas.
He twirled the Plus Five Pepper Spray and sheathed it in his parka pocket. He caught my eyes and shook his head. Whatever I thought I'd seen in his eyes was gone now, they were just deep grey pools in the dark. He motioned to me, and slipped back to the spruces, then cut across into the driveway, from there we just walked up to the door behind Lorien.
Anyway, anybody with a Newf had to be ok.
Lorien was scribbling something on a piece of paper. She finished and handed it to Hobbit Woman.
The Newf came over and slobbered cheerfully on Legolas. He smiled and rubbed the dog's moose-sized head.
"I'll be right over." Hobbit Woman was saying.
We hurried back to the truck, hoping Hobbit Woman wouldn't think too hard about why we seemed to be on foot.
"He says it wasn't her." Lorien said. "Nothing on that farm felt evil. Dogs don't lie"
"I figured."
"Did you see her truck?"
"Yeah, EVL WMN."
"She said it's the song that was playing when she met her husband. The truck was a present from him."
"Yeah, I figured."
"You did not. You looked like you saw a balrog."
"I did not."
"Did too."
"Not."
"Too!"
"No way!"
"Way!"
Our voices were going up the scale to die the death of ten thousand screams level.
"Knock it off." It was a slightly deeper version of Dana's schoolhorse voice.
We both froze, staring at Legolas.
He looked at Lorien, then at me. Then he laid a hand on each of our shoulders, with all the practiced grace of a prince trained in centuries of diplomacy. He said something in Elvish that sounded like poetry, like song.
I looked at Lorien.
"He said, 'I need you both.'"

PART THE SECOND

Flintstones and Jetsons
Friday night: Lizard
Dana didn't look surprised when Hobbit Woman drove up in her dual-axled monster truck with the trailer the size of Grandma's Winnebago. I've seen houses smaller than that thing. After the Shire...his name was Sam...rumbled away with Mr. and Mrs. Cotton, we went back up to the house to thaw Lorien out with some hot chocolate. Kodi and Shenzi lurked under the table, waiting for the odd Keebler elf to fall to its doom. Dana'd had no more luck with any of her research on spells; Love, Summoning or Finding Your Handsome Prince.
I think Lorien looked a little disappointed. I think.
I just felt relieved.
"Dead end." Lorien intoned.
"How'd the Nazgul Queen get the truck and trailer and horse, though. Seems like it'd be kinda' hard to steal." I said.
"Not with a charm spell. A really big kickass one." Dana said. She looked like Gandalf contemplating the treachery of Saruman. Professor Xavier contemplating Magneto's next move. The Doctor confronted by a city of daleks.
"You don't need to see my identification. I'm not the Nazgul Queen you're looking for." I said, waving my hand, Jedi-like.
Dana laughed, "It's not quite like that with the ones I know about. You have to be close, very close to the person, and eye contact is almost always necessary. Nobody remembered the truck going missing." Dana said, "I asked if anybody'd borrowed it, or rented it. Mrs. Cotton didn't remember anything but walking out there this morning and finding her horse gone."
Shenzi leered up at me from her spot under the table. "Whoa." I said. I looked at Legolas, draining his third cup of hot chocolate.
He peered back over the rim of his mug, eyes bright silver-blue with curiosity.
"What about the dog?" I said. "Maybe it's like Sam the Shire, he remembers what car the real Evil Woman drove up in. Maybe he saw the license plate!"
"That's almost too easy." Dana said. "It never resolves that easily in a book. Anyway, Sam probably remembered the license plate because he goes in that monster rig all the time. Maybe a strange car wouldn't be remembered in such detail."
Lorien said something to Legolas, I caught the word hu-beleg...mighty big dog.
He shook his head, the dog remembered a strange car engine, then being shut in the house.
Dana nodded.
We sat for awhile, staring into our chocolate. "Waitaminute," I said, "There were other animals around there, the other horses, birds...birds, like the ones who brought messages to the Mirkwood folk." Like Lorien had told me. I gave her a Meaningful Look.
She turned and chattered excitedly to Legolas. He nodded, and those longbow lips stretched back into that smile that reminded me of Shenzi.

Saturday morning
We met at Dana's barn the next morning. I chucked Kodi into the big kennel with Shenzi. Lorien looked a little bleary, despite the thirty-two ounce coffee she was holding in one Chilean-mittened hand. I noticed the mittens didn't match. "What happened to the other one?" I said. "The one that goes with the one that doesn't go with the one I burned in the spell?"
She just glared at me over her Hazelnut Cream. Probably a bookmark at the bottom of a stuff drift in her room. "Tell me again why we are here at the butt-crack of dawn?"
Lorien never says butt.
"Lots of bird activity."
"They can't be awake at this hour."
As if in answer a gawdawful screeching erupted outside, a noise guaranteed to wake even Lorien. We poked our heads out of the barn door, a horde of starlings had rumbled up on their Harleys and were mobbing the bird feeder, terrorizing all the native species. Then one of them squawked and the rest vanished in a storm of wings. A big dark shape drifted across just over the feeder.
Kodi let out a long aroooooo! from the kennel.
Lorien fumbled in a pocket.
"Cooper's Hawk." I said automatically. Then frowned. Too slow for a Coop, they hit bird feeders like rockets. All you see is a grey streak and the puff of feathers where the sparrow exploded.
The dark shape drifted up and landed in a nearby tree. Kodi, and now Shenzi had their noses lined up on it like rifle muzzles.
"It's a crow, oh Great Keeper of All Bird Knowledge." Lorien said, raising her digital camera and stalking toward the tree it had landed in.
I squinted at it, it did sort of look crowish. I thought to ask Legolas, but he was out in the round pen schooling Beo. I walked towards the big bird's tree. It cocked its head, looking down a beak like a broadsword, edged with feathers like a young Dwarf's beard. Ten feet away, I heard the whir-click of Lorien's camera. "It's grey. Dark, silvery grey, not black." I said, frowning like Lorien. But it definitely wasn't a hook-beaked hawk. It lifted off, and flew away west on broad wings. I noted the wedge-shaped tail.
"No way!" I said.
"What?" Lorien came up beside me, eyes scanning the little screen in the back of the camera.
"That was a raven."
"So?"
I yanked the camera from her hand and scanned the pictures she had just taken. Good pictures. Clear pictures. I pointed to the wedge-shaped tail and the broadsword beak. "Raaaaaven," I enunciated, "not crow. Corvid, yes, but bigger, smarter, with a wedge-shaped tail."
"I repeat, so?"
"They don't live around here. Farther north and west, yes, but not here."
She peered at the digital pics dancing by on the tiny screen. "You're sure it wasn't some kind of big weird seagull?" She cast a worried glance back at the barn. No Legolas. She let out a sigh of relief, no sea-longing to deal with, yet, at least.
"They come in other colors sometimes." I told her. And it was not really grey. It was dark silver, like storm-tossed seas, like Legolas' eyes. Like a grulla horse. And it looked like it had been watching me. A weird little chill walked up my spine. Kodi and Shenzi were staring off into the west, where the raven had flown. I glanced back into the barn. Legolas came through the doors on the far end with Beo.
The raven was gone.
Legolas slid off, leaving a thigh-shaped dust mark just behind Beo's withers, and a matching one on the butt and thighs of his jeans. Nice shape, I thought.
Lorien punched me in the arm, hard.
There was no halter, no soft cotton rope on the big horse, they'd been working in the round pen again, and the sight of a bridleless horse there wouldn't inspire too much interest in Dana's half awake morning crowd. Beo dropped his head and gave Legolas an affectionate nose-shove. I wished I was Beo. I wished I didn't have horse poop all over my boots and crud on my jeans. I almost wished I'd painted my nails and done my hair.
No, wait, I take that bit about the nails back.
"How's it going?" I asked. Not that Legolas would understand it. I was beginning to wish I'd paid more attention to things like glosseopaeia.
"Yabba-dabba-do!" he said with enthusiasm.
Lorien's eyes widened in horror, "What?"
"He's quoting great twentieth century literature; Flintstones, I believe."
"Oh noooooo!"
Dana came in leading Pumpkin. "I think he was up all night. Wanted to work on his language skills. Once he figured out how to work the remotes for the VCR, TV and DVD, I couldn't pry it out of his hands. Typical man...er...male." she shot a furtive glance at the student waving from the door. "I woke up this morning to Cartoon Network."
"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" quothe our Elf.
"Yeah," Dana said. "Pray they never invent remotes in Middle-earth."

pae-a-nel: Legolas
Gimli watched the last wet rune fade from the deck, "Cee Dee, Dee Vee Dee, Tee Vee, Vee Cee aaaRRRRR. What strange folk these are! Do they never give anything a proper name, or just letters of their alphabet?
"Yes of course, many things have names, but some of them are so long they must abbreviate them."
"Shorten a name? Preposterous! It takes the power from it!"
Legolas shook his head, "The names were not important. These things had the power of ee-lectrissity."
"Heee-licks-what?"
"Like wizard lightning running through wires. It powered their lights and all the things with no names."
"Where did it come from?"
"Some great company of wizards headed by someone called Mother Bell. I saw one of their fortresses on the Great River. They used the power of water to make their ee-lectrissity. And at another, there were great towers breathing steam into the air." His eyebrows folded in concentration, "Lorien called it Three Mile Island. She said something about atoms..."
"Adan? Men? Of course, it's their craft. Who else would it be?"
"Att-om." Legolas enunciated. The Dwarf's hearing was definitely going the way of mortal beings, the Elf thought with a sigh.
"Adam? Is he related to Mother Bell?"

The Birdbath of Galadriel
Lizard
We thought about driving to our pullover from yesterday and walking up the hill and hiding in the cedars. Then I considered the liklihood of Lorien staying in the truck.
None.
I considered the likelihood of Lorien not sounding like a herd of moose in the woods, in the daylight.
None.
I called Mrs. Cotton and asked if we could come visit Sam. Lorien sat on a haybale near the barn phone, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands folded in some kind of ohhhhhmmmm gesture on her knees.
Legolas just stared at her, like he might at some odd sort of forest fungus.
Kodi and Shenzi grinned at them both, as if they Knew Something.
Oddly enough, Mrs. Cotton agreed to a visit.
I hung up the phone, looked at Lorien.
She smiled at me. Kinda' like Shenzi.

pae-a-canad: Legolas
"You're saying the Dwarvish lass could do magic? Like your folk?"
Legolas sighed. In all the many years he'd known Gimli, he had never been able to get certain concepts through that thick Dwarven skull..."It is only magic if you do not understand how it works. I will try to explain..."
"Legolas..."
"She was channeling the energy of mid..."
"Legolas!"
The Elf stopped in mid-word. Something no Elf ever did. Ever had, in the entire history of Middle-earth unless he met sudden death. Especially for a Dwarf.
"I would like to hear the rest of the tale before I die!" Gimli said.
Legolas opened his mouth for a clever comeback, but the words fizzled like soggy wizard fireworks. He met the earth brown eyes of his longtime friend. Brown like the deep places under the mountains, like a winter deer, like bearhide, like fallen leaves.
Mortal, like all those things. "Very well," he said gently, and continued the tale.

Lizard
Mrs. Cotton's barn made me feel like a Hobbit. Everything was ten sizes too big. Unlike Dana's barn with its rough wood and natural stone, this was all finished and polished and perfect. Inside and outside were full of flower boxes (nearly empty for winter) and shrubs, all of which looked like a horde of Sam Gamgees had been busy with their shears. She handed us three hot chocolates and some excellent homemade cookies, and gave us a cheery tour. Lorien pointed her camera everywhere; falling off haybale perches, tripping backwards over wheelbarrows and buckets, and hanging precariously off fences.
Mrs. Cotton just gave her a smile and a wave of the hand, encouraging her to take more. Mrs. Cotton's eyes were on Legolas. She tried to talk to him until we told her he was Norwegian and didn't speak English. She looked really disappointed.
For about five seconds, then she spoke to him in some odd-sounding language.
He gave her a strange look, as if he had just seen a familiar face in an alien land, but he didn't answer.
I was really hoping it wasn't Norwegian. Maybe we should have told her he was Croatian, or Uzbekistani, or Deaf.
Or Sindarin. That would have stumped her.
Mrs. Cotton looked disappointed again. "I guess my college Anglo-Saxon isn't close enough."
Legolas composed his face and whispered something to Lorien. Mrs. Cotton was already moving toward the next stall.
"What?" I poked Lorien.
"Anglo-Saxon, that is Old English, is Rohirric."
"Uh oh."
"He doesn't really speak it, but he recognizes it. When he was young, the Eotheod..."
"The who?"
"The people who would become the Rohirrim, dodo. They lived on the west side of Mirkwood. That's where the Elves got a lot of their horses and..."
Lorien was falling into The Early History of Middle-earth 101 on one side of me, and Mrs. Cotton was going on about the Medieval History of the Shire 102 on the other. I shot Legolas a look that said shut Lorien up before I stuff a haybale up her nose.
He gave me a startled look, eyed two forty pound bales stacked by a nearby stall door, and hastily pulled Lorien to the next stall.
Mrs. Cotton wandered down the barn aisle, pointing out exceptional bloodlines, winning conformation, grand champion training. She showed us the polished carriages, the shiny harnesses, the gleaming brass nameplates on the stalls. I craned my neck up at a huge bay horse being groomed by a stable girl.
"What's her name?"
"Belladonna." she said cheerfully, handing me another cookie.
That sounded vaguely familiar somehow. I think it's an herb or something. Behind me I heard Lorien choke on her cookie. Legolas was rubbing the face of a dark bay horse leaning out of a stall labeled Bungo.
What a wierd name for a horse.
We wandered outside to the big white fence. Several well-kept giants gathumped up in slow motion, and poked their coffee table sized heads over the fence, snuffling in our jackets for treats. Legolas scritched their faces and sang some soft words to them. Mrs. Cotton went happily on about bloodlines and carriage training. I nodded and smiled, though I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to be behind a horse when they could be on one.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Legolas wander away from the fence. About then Mrs. Cotton chirped at the horses and sent them all off in a lovely floating trot. She chattered about gaits and shoulders and movement and why a good carriage horse was actually not good to ride. I nodded and smiled and tried to see what Legolas was doing without looking.
Mrs. Cotton suddenly stopped chattering and stared.
Our Elf was standing by a hugely ornate birdbath, an angelic smile on his face.
He was covered in birds.
Tufted titmice, juncos, little brownish stubby-beaked sparrows (English, white throated, white crowned) little brownish stubby-beaked finches (house, purple and gold), and one camouflaged cardinal (female). There was a tiny grey nuthatch on his snowboarder hat, and three mourning doves cooing around his feet. A little black and white downy woodpecker was hopping up his leg. A couple of starlings were fighting for a position on his shoulder, until the divebombing blue jay chased them away. He looked just like on of those of Asissi bird feeders people put in their gardens.
Only hotter.
Uh ohhhhhhh..."Loriennnnnnnn..." I said.
"Wow!" she said.
"Oh my!" Mrs. Cotton said.
Oh crap ohcrapohcrap! This will take some explaining. A lot of explaining. I frantically tried to think of some logical reason our Norwegian exchange student would attract birds like ants on honey. Like Legolas attracts girls. There wasn't one.
"Just like Beleg." Mrs. Cotton said, beaming.
I heard a huge sputter from Lorien as she snorked the rest of her chocolate through her nose. I knew that name, courtesy of my book-geek friend; one hot Elven Ranger from the Silmarillion. I shot a panicked glance at her.
Her eyes were bigger than mine, which was nearly impossible. We looked at our Elf. His glance went from Lorien to me to Mrs. Cotton, one eyebrow crept up in a Spocklike ? he mouthed.
"Who?" I squawked it out like a startled blue jay.
"Oh, of course you wouldn't know. Kids these days. They watch TV, movies, they play video games. They never read. JRR Tolkien. The Silmarillion. Beleg Cuthalion was an Elven Ranger, the Chief Marchwarden of King Thingol of Doriath."
Legolas' eyebrows crept up another notch. Doriath?!
"He could talk to the forest animals." Mrs. Cotton beamed wider, then her face went all sad and mushy like. "But he was killed by his best friend, a tragic tale. But still one of my favorites."
Legolas' eyes were going from to me to Lorien, both eyebrows a question mark.
Mrs. Cotton stepped closer to the birdbath, beaming her Hobbit smile at Legolas. Her face went from sad and mushy to fascinated and mushy. "How does he do that? I've stood out here for hours with birdseed in my hand and they..."
"Um," Lorien galumped up to the birdbath, the birds scattered in panic.
Mrs. Cotton's face went from mushy to slightly annoyed. "I've read it." Lorien said breathlessly, "Beleg was one of my favorites too. And Voronwe."
Hobbit Woman's face softened. "Ah yes, the last mariner of the last fleet to seek the Undying Lands. I loved the way he got sidetracked in the Willow Meads and just stood there for days, listening to the bees and birds and dreaming. Such a sweetie. Just like my Arnold."
"Ah, I guess you've read the Hobbit?" Lorien said.
"Why yes, dear, where do you think I got all my horses' names? Too bad though that the last book took such a horrific turn. I soooooo wished The Professor had lived a bit longer, to do a sequel you know, to straighten everything out. I mean poor Glorfindel, having to face a second balrog." She shook her head and made a tsk tsk noise, like an annoyed squirrel.
"The last book?" I asked.
She gave me a long patient look, the kind reserved for those video wasteland teens she had been talking about, "Lord of the Rings, of course." Her face kind of misted over, "It was so sad about the Elves..."
"What?" I said, it only came out as a whisper.
"Under the new Dark Lord, I don't think any of them made it to the Grey Havens."

pae-a-leben: Legolas
Gimli frowned thoughtfully, "Your ladies were heavy of heart? Why?"
"I had sensed it before. But I was busy learning the ways of their land, and all of us were learning each other's languages. Lorien did not tell me what made her glance away from my eyes, or why Lizard looked at me sometimes like a hound who has stolen the roast. They hid their thoughts well."
"Na lu thent. For awhile. But not an-uir...forever. When Lizard removed me from my bath, something had slipped in the Stream of Time. Something that affected not only me, but all of my people, and yours, and all of Middle-earth."

Lizard
We fled as soon as we could politely pry ourselves loose from Mrs. Cotton's hobbitality.
Lorien looked grim.
"We'll get him back home." I said at last, with more certainty than I felt.
She threw me a look like daggers.
"What about the birds?" I said to Legolas, "Fileg...beth fileg." Bird word, as close as I could remember it.
Legolas gave me a smile, instead of laughing his butt off like he probably wanted to. Then the smile faded.
"Fileg u-gennir." he hesitated, searching for the words, "Birds see...saw nothing." He said something lengthier to Lorien, in Elvish.
"Birds, and horses, pay attention to what's important to them, and a strange car in the driveway was beneath their notice." she said.
Too bad, I thought, at least birds see in color.

pae-ar-eneg: Legolas
Gimli shook his head, "Do not even start with the Stream of Time thing again. What I want to know is why did Hobbit Woman know the name of Beleg Cuthalion? And Thingol, and Doriath! And of the Companion of Tuor and Guardian of Elrond's Father Earendil; Voronwe? And yet not recognize you for an Elf?"
"It was long since any of my folk, or yours, had walked that land. She knew the names only from The Books. A great scribe had put down many of the greatest tales of my kindred...of all of Middle-earth in those books. With pictures. Pictures! Paintings such as the finest of our artists could do. Only they had some way of..." the Elf frowned, searching for a lost word.
The Dwarf leaned forward, then thought better of it, it only disturbed his stomach. He sat back against the mast. "...way of?" he prompted.
Legolas shook his head. "These Edain had many books, and ways to make them quickly. No need for calligraphers and artists to do each copy. At the book store, and the comic shop there were thousands of books, and many of each title, and they were exactly alike. Alike! Paintings and all! Dana alone had as many books as Rivendell. Most of hers contained more words than pictures, though some had a few beautiful illustrations. Lizard brought some of her favorites to the farm for me to see; they were of a different kind, shorter stories, larger and fewer pages, and composed mainly of pictures. When I had still not learned to read their language, or even speak it very well, she and Lorien read some of those stories to me. Tales of heroes who could fly and teleport and control the weather, heroes whose flaming eyes, or burning hands could punch a hole through a mountain, heroes with minds as powerful as the greatest wizard. The pictures themselves told the tale well enough without the words."
"Hmmmph." Gimli said thoughtfully. "Books, like gold coins minted from the same mold. Magic of the Edain, I guess. Like carriages with chained wargs under the hood. Or rainbows that make music."
Legolas nodded, "We would call it magic. But any sufficiently advanced craft would be indistinguishable from magic." He fell silent for a moment, then smiled. "There was one character I remember from Lizard's books who reminds me of you."
"Eh?"
"He was short, stout, strong...unstoppable." Legolas smiled, "A good friend for an Elf to have at his side."
"A dwarf!" Gimli said with some satisfaction.
"He did not call himself that, though he was shorter than most Men. But he was much like your folk. He was named for a large, strong relative of the badgers that make their homes underground as your folk do, a creature the northern folk called wolverine. The man I speak of could be gruff, but his friends knew his true heart, a stout, loyal heart." Legolas peered up into the grey ship's rigging, singing in the wind blowing from the west.
Gimli saw his eyes go warm grey with memory, one that seemed to be more than just pictures in a book.
"One of his great friends was an Elf, one who would have been right at home here, on this ship." He leapt up and caught hold of one of the shrouds, the many long lines which held the masts in place. He swung in a swift hawk circle, drawing an imaginary cutlass. He landed back on deck with barely a sound, and cast his eyes back up into the spiderweb of rope that held mast and sail and ship together, and at the towering clouds of canvas like the individual feathers of a bird's wing.
"I wonder what it would be like to have a tail."

I Go to Find the Suuuuuuuuuuuuuun!
Or How Caradhras Would Have Been Better With Snowboards
Lizard
Life and poop goes on, but we'd pretty much kicked the poop problem for the day. Dana had some lessons, and she'd promised Amanda one with Beo.
And, of course, our Elf.
I wanted to stay and watch, but Dana suggested... rather the way Sauron might suggest to a Nazgul that he should find a certain lost trinket...that I work with Lorien and Pumpkin a bit. I grumbled off to the arena with the chub club, while Legolas and Dana vanished to the round pen with Amanda the Amazing and Beowabbit. Amanda, tall and slender and beautiful and possessed of enough money to buy a new truck and the best horse trailer. Amanda who was walking, no...slinking beside our Elf and beaming at him with the kind of smile that would have had the whole Film Of The Rings cast following her with little hearts sprouting up in their eyeballs. We stared after them.
Lorien raised her hands in a recentering breath.
I gave her a questioning look.
"I'm trying really hard not to hate her." she said.
"Yeah, really."
Lorien bumpity-bumped around the arena, doing a passable sitting trot, one hand firmly clenched on the pommel, the other steering cowboy style. Pumpkin collapsed into a plod and Lorien unlocked the other hand and steered her two-handed through Dana's beginner obstacle course. She knocked down three standing poles and rearranged the cavallettis with Pumpkin's feet.
But she came out grinning. "I want Legolas to show me how to shoot a bow off a horse." she said. She stopped, rummaged in her pocket, and took a picture of the back of Pumpkin's ears.
I thought of a bunch of snappy comebacks, all centering on the idea that she should learn to not fall off the horse first, but none of them came out. I just nodded and smiled. She plopped around the arena some more, gradually thumping Pumpkin into another slow jog. I wandered off to rearrange the flattened obstacle course.
Something had been tickling at the back of my head, and now it felt like eyeballs boring into my neck. I turned.
Empty barn door. Horses in the pasture. Dana's voice from the round pen. The chatter of winter birds.
Birds.
I looked up expectantly at the trees, looking for a big dark silver shape.
Nothing. A couple of crows, a redtail soaring on the thermals. A couple of vultures circling over the nearby road, looking for roadkill. I made a full circle. Wind chimes on the tree at the edge of the yard. The basketballl-sized Victorian gazing ball, a sort of purpley-blue Christmas ball on a stand, the kind that sometimes are called faerie globes. The birdbath woven out of sticks. Fifteen different birdfeeders, all busy. Shenzi and Kodi in the kennel. Yeah, Shenzi could stare a hole in Galadriel's head, but it wasn't her that was making me feel squicky. I shook my head, must be leftover nerves from this morning.
There was a warm spot on my chest where Dana's spell bag hung. Decidedly warm.
I looked in the trees again, but there were no ravens in sight.

An hour later Dana was done, and so were we. We trailed around after her for awhile, asking questions till she shooed us away.
"There isn't any more you can do right now, so go outside and play. I'm going to visit a friend of mine this afternoon, and do some more research on this."
"Isn't there anything we can do?"
"Yeah, rent a Hav-a-heart trap from the SPCA...see if they have one in a Nazgul Queen size."
"Hah, hah." I said.
"Hey..." Lorien said.
"She was kidding!"
"No, the trap thing...there's got to be a way. I mean, if we had her, that would solve everything."
"Don't mess with her. Not without me." Dana said in the Voice. The one that meant if you don't, I'll feed you to Shenzi. "And I don't even know yet how we could nail her. I mean, what would we tell the cops? Gee, this sorceress kidnapped an Elf from an alternate universe and we have to pick her brains apart to find out how to return him."
Yeah, really.
"We'll come up with a way to deal with her. If not, her karma will get her eventually." Dana said.
Yeah, well maybe my karma would just run over her dogma.
I asked if there was some way to accidentally zap her into an alternate universe. Preferably one with large, hungry predators.
Dana laughed, Shenzi grinned up at me, like a cave troll. "Go find something silly and teenagery to do with the rest of your Saturday afternoon. You'll have to deal with Nazguls and high school teachers soon enough. Come back around seven, we''ll have a movie night." She threw her work gloves into the toolbox by the door and closed it behind us.
I caught Lorien's shoulder and dragged her toward the truck.
"Hey," Dana called to us, "Take the Elf with you. Last time I left him alone, he popped all the microwave popcorn at once, just to see how it worked."
Lorien giggled.
Legolas looked confused.
"What other wonders of twentieth century civilization should we show him?" Lorien said.
"Ski Roundtop." I said with an evil grin.
"Oh noooooo!" Lorien wailed.
"There's no snow." Lorien said hopefully. "It is the middle of November, there is no snow in York County."
"Yrch?!" Legolas said in surprise. Which sounds a bit like oooo-rr-kh.
"Not orcs, York." Lorien said. Which sounds a bit like yoooo-rr-k.
"Orc?" he snapped back.
"York."
"Yrch." he asserted.
"YORK!" Lorien enunciated with passion.
"Yeah, yrch." he said.
"Yeah, ooorrkhh." I agreed, "Most of the guys around here are."

Roundtop is a bit like Weathertop, only with snowmaking equipment and ski lifts instead of ruins. Unless some newbie skier crashes and burns into a tribe of snowboarders...then there's ruins.
We went through the lodge and picked up our lift tickets and a couple of rentals. Practically every woman we passed turned and looked at us, a couple of the guys did too, but they weren't drooling like Newfoundlands. In fact most of them looked kinda' like Shenzi eyeing a potential victim.
And it wasn't me and Lorien any of them were looking at.
I had my good old board from a couple of years ago, and a new one I'd just got; Dana'd paid me for a few extra jobs over the summer. They were both light, flexible, not like the heavy planks you get at the rental. I went and picked out a decent rental board and a pair of boots. I handed my old board and boots to Lorien. It was wasted on her, but at least she had a chance this way of remaining vertical for more than two seconds. I gestured for one of Legolas' boots, read the size and got him a pair of snowboard boots from the rental. I handed him the new board.
He turned it over, running his hands along it, the way he did the bow, in the movie, when he was blond, and Orlando Bloom. He flexed it, hefted it. Then he did the same with my other board, and the rental. He looked up at me, both boards in his hands, started to hand me mine back.
"No. I can do this anytime." I thrust the good one back at him.
He hesitated for one long princely diplomatic moment, then nodded in understanding, his eyes pools of warm grey. We lashed him into the boots, stiff for support, with a built-in lean forward. He stood up and tried to walk in them. He sat down abruptly, on the floor, glaring up at us, from under his outrageous snowboarder hat. He snapped something at Lorien. She giggled, and took a picture.
"What?"
He says obviously there must be some Dwarves left in Orc County, because nobody else would have thought of such a...well, I'm not sure what that word was...design."
"Explain that it's so you don't break your ankles when you go down the slope at warp 10."

pae-ar-odog: Legolas
"Warp 10?" Gimli said.
"An allusion to extreme speed achieved by a starship called Enterprise."
"They had ships like this one? Like the ship of Earendil who sails the night sky?"
"Yes...no, well, yes but different. Like a big flying pancake with..." Legolas made sausage shapes in the air with his hands...
"Pancakes and sausages?" Gimli leaned forward, frowning at the air shapes, he glanced up at the graceful wings of canvas swaying above him, "Breakfast food does not seem like a proper design for a ship. It would sink. Straight to the bottom."
"This ship flew among the stars. Anyway, it was just a tale on TV. Special effects."
"Special eFF eXX? Teee Veee?"
"Like Gandalf's fireworks, or a very clever stage show. Dana loved to watch it, and when I learned the language better, I found it...fascinating. Funny, the second in command looked just like Elrond."

Lizard
Lorien clunked out behind us in my boots, looking frighteningly like Gimli, swaddled in layers of down and polyfill. Squashed by her bike helmet and hat, her hair mooshed together under her chin and made a passable beard too. She had that determined Lorien look on her face, the one that said neither ice, moguls, kamikaze snowboarders, or five year olds who were better than her would stay her from her course.
I pulled everybody into a huddle at the bottom of Fanny Hill. We looked over at the cluster of first-timers with their instructor, making Vs and Ws with their skis, waddling like overstuffed ducks. A few of them glanced our way, then glanced our way again. Mostly women. We watched a couple of families, down-clad tots suspended between the hands of Mom and Dad, sliding down the gentle slope of Fanny Hill. A newbie boarder fell off the lift at the top of the hill and half scrambled half slithered out of the way of four skiers behind him. I pointed over to the double-diamond slopes; the expert slopes on the steep part of the hill. The ones with names like Gunbarrel and Ramrod. A skier shot down, weaving between the slalom markers. A snowboarder carved back and forth in great sweeping arcs. Another followed on a smaller racing board; I couldn't really make out the board, but I could see he was doing about warp eleven. I knew Legolas could see exactly what they were doing, where I could see a colorful blur. "Watch them." I told him.
"Tiro curu tin." Lorien said.
He watched with a look like an eagle on a powerline tower, eyes pale silver in the snowlight.
Behind us, three skiers came to a halt and watched him. All girls. One I recognized from history class. The one who had a different nail job every week.
Lorien stomped around, trying to stay warm. Then thought better of it and huddled up against Legolas. He didn't seem to mind. I huddled on the other side, even though I didn't need to.
Visions of Keebler Elfwich cookies came to my mind, and Legolas was the creamy filling. I glanced over at the three girls, their eyes still pasted to our Elf, and gave them a big Shenzi grin. They cranked their noses up a notch and slithered off.
"Ok," Legolas said suddenly. "Good." He moved, Lorien wobbled, he caught her, smiling.
I shook my head, picked up my board.
We strapped ourselves into our boards, and one more time, I showed Lorien how it was done. She smiled through her teeth and grimly stood up. And fell over. And stood up. And fell over.
Legolas rolled to his feet, frowned at the contraption his feet were locked into.
Suddenly he reminded me of the Burger King action figure on its little base. I looked over at Lorien, "The Ring must be destroyed!" I said in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. Really, that's how the action figure sounded; the Elfinator.
She laughed so hard she fell over again.
Legolas just looked at us, the way Elrond did at Merry and Pippin at the Council. Eyebrows and all.
Two middle-aged women skied by. The one in front turned to look and her buddy crashed into her. They slid in a grumbly tangle most of the way to the safety net.
Lorien lurched to her feet again and slithered a few feet.
Legolas watched me, tilting on one edge of the board, then the other. He nodded, and rocked from toe edge to heel edge.
I hopped a few feet.
He hopped.
I hopped and twisted in mid-air.
He hopped and twisted, a bit higher than was technically possible by a newbie. Or any known human who had not spent a lifetime in a half-pipe or a circus.
A couple of teenage boys stopped and stared in blatant worship.
I grinned.
A big smirk started across Legolas' face.
I heard a woman on skis muttering something about learning to snowboard.
I hopped a few times and slid down the gentle slope toward the safety net, tilting and turning just before I got to it, then scraping to a halt.
Somewhere behind me I heard a "yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!" and Lorien whizzed by.
Legolas did a nice little carving turn, even though he wasn't really going fast enough to carve properly.
Lorien splatted into the net.
Legolas hopped and slid over and heaved her to her feet. He brushed her off. She clung to his arm like a damsel in distress.
I glared at her.
Legolas found her center of gravity for her and hopped away. He hopped to the top of the little rise where everyone was practicing, and slid down, his whole body making graceful, delicious otter curves.
About forty women stopped what they were doing to watch. Three more crashes occured. And possibly a few divorces.
Our Elf swooshed to a halt in front of the safety net, grinning from ear to pointy little ear.
"Ok," I said, "Time to hit Fanny Hill." I pointed up the line of slow-moving lift chairs to the top of the hill.
He eyed the lifts with a combination of fascination and nearly suppressed terror. He was unbuckling his board when I reached him.
"No no no!" I said, "Leave one foot on the board, makes it easier to get off the lift." I demonstrated, right foot pushing, left foot strapped in, as if you're on a skateboard. I slid toward the lift.
Legolas tucked his board under his arm and started to walk up the hill.
"Nooooo!" I shoved and slid as fast as I could, and caught his arm. I pointed at the lift. He cocked a meaningful eyebrow at me.
Lorien's board was pointed in our direction, but it was sliding the other way. She called something to him in Elvish, and he went back and caught her arm, towing her to me.
"Would you please explain to him he can't just waltz up the hill? He'll get mowed down by skiers or something." I said.
"More like manic snowboarders." she said. "I think he can avoid them though. They can't be much worse than orcs."
Lorien grabbed both his arms and heaved herself around to face him, banging him in the shins with her board, and landing squarely on his feet. He ignored it. She babbled something at him, occasionally loosing her grip for a teetering moment to point up the hill.
Finally he nodded, "Ok." He let out a resigned sigh.
When in Orc County, do as the orcs do.
We scooted over to the lift, Lorien suspended between us like an enormous toddler. Somewhere behind me I heard a guy's voice, "aaaaah!" and a thud. I turned to see two twenty-something women shoving past him toward us. We went through the Hobbit-high railings, Legolas closely watching the skiers ahead of us get scooped up by the moving chairs. He had a grim look on his face, as if he'd rather face a horde of rampaging orcs. We scooted forward, Lorien went "Waaaaahhhhh!" and the chair hit us in the butt. I grabbed it and heaved Lorien up, like I had before. Legolas let out a startled exclamation and sat down, snowboard tangling with mine and Lorien's. I pulled the safety bar down, right on Legolas' arm.
"Ack!" he said.
I had no idea ack was an Elvish word. I lifted the bar far enough for him to extract himself. Lorien grabbed me in a Watcher in the Water death grip, staring down at the snow well below us now. I shoved her into Legolas and lowered the bar. Then I shoved everybody's snowboards around so they were facing left foot forward, ready to dismount.
We drifted serenely over snowy slopes, gleaming white in the sun, with flashes of bright color weaving down, making swoopy Elvish curves in the packed snow. Lorien rummaged in the depths of her pink coat, a Grandma gift, produced her camera, and shot pictures of the action. Below us, one of the classes was just finishing up, and a few of the skiers were heading for the lifts. Oh goodie, more newbies, a whole pack of them. I tried to remember their colors, so I knew who wouldn't get out of my way; red and bright blue and something purple and blue/yellow and one in Barbie doll pink. The slope came up under us, and the chair floated over the off-ramp, I flung the bar up and slid off, dragging Lorien with me. She lurched, grabbed, and we both went over in a tangled pile. I peered over her bike helmet hoping Legolas had a clue how to get off. I pictured him staying on the lift chair, I pictured him stuck up there going round and round and round, I pictured the whole lift being stopped. I pictured the leggy Ski Patrol swooshing silently up with grim looks. I pictured the stout, hairy little Maintenence Department guys on their snowmobiles armed with axes and ladders and tools. I pictured lots of questions...
Legolas slid by us, skewed to a perfect halt, held out a hand, to me, then to Lorien. He stuck his other foot in the binding and strapped it down. He gave me a sharp nod, warrior to warrior, and headed for the slope.
Three women wobbling on new skis looked longingly after him.
I called back over my shoulder, "I want to do a training run with Legolas, make sure he's got it, ok?"
"Oh, just go ahead," Lorien called out behind me, "I'll be ok." I think she learned that guilt-inducing voice from her grandmother. 'I'll just end up going down the death slope at ninety miles and hour and crash into the padded telephone poles and die horribly, but you go have fun'.
"Hang loose, we'll come back for you." I knew she could go down Fanny Hill by herself, even if I could go down three times before she got down once. She'd be fine.
Oh Maaaaaan, that Grandmother Voice really worked. I shoved the Guilty Feeling of All Time back down into its cellar, and swooshed across the slope. It was hard to do a real carve on these gentle slopes, but I did a good, sharp turn and came back around facing upslope. Legolas cut across the slope above me in a nice sweeping arc. I held my breath as he neared the treeline, but he tilted on his toe edge and made a clean turn, leaving a line in the snow like the edge of an Elvish blade. We swept back and forth across the slope in lines like Rivendell architecture, weaving between new skiers and moms and little kids. A few started drifting in our direction, like cats to a newly opened can of Fancy Feast...mostly women.
Elf gravity.
I hit one of the low moguls on the side and caught some air, he followed me; I carved, facing upslope and saw him jump like a cat. He went airborne like somebody who'd been born in a halfpipe. I heard a "Sheeeeeit!" from a twelve year old to my right. Legolas came down in perfect balance, and swept toward me. I stuck out a hand. It was a game some of us played on the harder slopes; see if you can get close enough to slap your buddy's hand. It took good control, and precision on the double diamonds. He probably wouldn't understand but...
He swooshed by and smacked my hand, a gleeful grin on his face.
I thought about sending him back. I thought how easy it would be for Dwarves to make snowboards.
I thought of Caradhras.
Uh oh.
Middle-earth would never be the same.
Things went a bit smoother on the second attempt at the ski-lift, except for the middle-aged newbie skier with an overdose of pink; expensive new ski jacket, cutesy little fuzzy-balled Barbie doll hat, and lipstick.
Whothehell wears lipstick on a ski slope?
She slithered up as we were going through the knee-high Hobbit railings, butting in front of a little kid with a snowboard. She smiled at Legolas as if I didn't exist, and tried to get on our chair. I scooted past her, hauling the Elf with me, accidently weaving the trailing edge of my board just in front of one of her skis. The chair scooped us up just as I heard a satisfying "Aaahhhh!" and a distinct thump.
We swooshed down Fanny Hill, trying to see how fast we could go. Halfway down I caught up with Lorien. She was sliding across the hill to the left, I swept around her. "How's it going?"
"Wonderful." she said. She leaned back and scraped to a halt and fell over. She hitched around facing upslope, wobbled to her feet and began a slow slide back across the hill to the right. Slide across, brake, fall over. Turn on butt on snow, wobble to feet, slide across hill, brake, fall over. It worked pretty well, actually, she hadn't broken anything yet, not even my board.
Legolas whooshed by and made a neat circle around us, like a hawk on the wing. He caught Lorien's hand.
"Waaauuuuughhh!" she said, and they vanished downslope way faster than she'd ever gone. They looked like ice dancers, like hawks.
Barbie Woman whooshed past me, not quite under total control.
I pointed my clunky rental board straight down the slope and crouched. A little twist here, a carve there, yeah, even Fanny Hill could be fun sometimes. I cut in front of Barbie Woman, making her snowplow and flail wildly with her poles. I gave her a wave and a Shenzi grin as she yawed toward the moguls. I circled around Lorien and Legolas, and the three of us wove a pattern prettier than those silver lines on Legolas' tunic. When he was blond and Orlando Bloom.
Somewhere behind me I heard a "Yaaaaahhhhhh!" and heard the sound of a newbie skier hitting the slope, and not the way she wanted to.
We did a couple more runs, and Lorien seemed to be getting the hang of things. Which meant she was hanging on our Elf less. He stuck close to her though, and I stuck close to him, though I was itching to get onto the double diamond slopes. By the looks of him, he'd be able to handle them, no problem. If I could pry him loose from Lorien.
By the fourth run Lorien was winded. We went partway down the slope, then made a little tribal circle in the middle of Fanny Hill. Snowboarders do it all the time, never skiers; just stopping in the middle of the slope to hang out and chat, sitting in a Council of Elrond in the snow. Lorien unearthed her camera from a pocket and snapped pics of snowboarders and skiers whoosing past.
After a few minutes I stood up, "I'll catch you in a couple minutes." I told Lorien. I nodded to Legolas, "Let's go."
Lorien waved us off with one hand, the other snapping pictures of us.
Ok, pictures of the Elf.
We wove our way downslope in great wild arcs, like wild horses. Like stooping falcons. Flying on the wind.
At the bottom I saw Barbie Woman. She followed us to the lift and missed our chair again, by one. She was starting to annoy me.
We slid off at the top, and wove our way through newbies and kids to where I could see Lorien talking to a brightly clad snowboarder, kneeling on the snow with her. We slowed, waved at her to follow. At the bottom I swept into a perfect halt.
Legolas wasn't behind me.
What the...I looked up the slope and ten yards away, he stood talking to Barbie Woman. Ok, she was doing all the talking, He was just standing there, kind of fascinated by her or something. I thought he had better taste than that. I hopped over, it was harder, and looked cooler than just slithering on one foot. Maybe I could intimidate her with my athletic ability.
"Hey." I said.
She looked at me with eyes like the bottom of the ocean.
The next thing I remember is Lorien yelling something; I think it was Aiya Earendil Elenion Ancalima! as she crashed into Barbie Woman. Then Legolas was picking her up and grabbing me by the hand. It was hard to get up any forward motion at all, much less speed that close to the bottom of the slope, but he did it. We slid off toward the ski lodge and ducked behind a padded phone pole just as one of the elegant Ski Patrol guys came whooshing up to Barbie Woman.
"We should go, now!" Lorien said.
"It was her. It had to be her."
"Do you remember what she looked like?" I said.
"No. Legolas doesn't either."
"Me either. I just remember the eyes. Weird." I said. We were huddled in Strider's cab, with the engine sputtering to life in the cold. Legolas twisted on the far side of the passenger seat, staring out one window, then the other with an expression like a hunting hawk.
"Wait, your camera." I reached out a hand.
Lorien dug in her pocket; flit, flit, flit, she scanned the digital pics she'd taken earlier. Flashes of color on the slopes, the blurs of snowboarders and skiers doing warp ten past her. A flash of hot pink, too far to see a face.
"Damn!" she said.
Lorien never says damn.
"We should have sprung the trap." Lorien said.
"With what? How? Hit her over the head with a snowboard?" I was annoyed. I wanted Nazgul Barbie's fuzzy pink hat balls on a mithril platter, but I couldn't think how to do it.
"Maybe Legolas could have done something, if he hadn't been so intent on getting us out of there." Lorien said.
"What? Legolas? He was the one she charmed in the first place. And Dana said not to mess with her."
"Since when has anything said by an adult deterred you?"
I gave her a sharp look.
"Maybe we should have followed her and tried to find her car." Lorien said.
I shook my head, "No time. If she could charm Legolas, she could charm Ski Patrol. Then we'd have them on our butts too. And it's not like that night on the trail, this time we didn't even see her coming." That really bugged me. I hadn't had a clue, neither had Legolas. And if she could sneak up on us like that...whooo boy. "And how did she know we were there, in the first place?" I reached for the protection charm Dana had given me and realized something.
It wasn't there.
I reached across Lorien to Legolas and stuck my hand inside his shirt.
"Hey, what the hell?" Lorien said.
She never says hell.
Legolas caught my hand and gave me a look like an annoyed cat.
"Where's your charm?" I said. I pointed at mine, or rather, where it should have been.
His hand went to his chest, and his eyes widened, then his face shifted to the kind of look cats give you when they leap for the steak on the counter and miss. He said something, so soft I didn't quite catch it.
"Um, he forgot it." Lorien said. "And yours?" She had noticed my own ineffectual groping.
"Yeah. I think I left it in the bathroom."
"Wonderful. I've got mine." She looked entirely too pleased with herself.
"Yeah, well anyway, how did Nazgul Barbie know we were going to be here?"
"Maybe she's got her own palantir." Lorien said. "She's being more subtle, too. No displays of raw power, like on the trail that night. Just sneak up and..."
"What? What does she want?"
Lorien looked at Legolas. "Well, she was talking to him. Charming his, um, boots off, it seemed. She ignored you, and never even noticed me."
"Yeah. How did you know? That it was her."
"Come on, Legolas standing there entranced by some cheesy chick in overgrown Barbie clothes? He's got better taste than that." She was silent for a moment, fingering the leather pouch Dana had given her. "And maybe this thing really works. I just had...a feeling."
"So, that was a purposeful crash?"
Lorien snorted, "Of course! I'm not that bad!"
I smiled. "Thanks." I paused, "Hannon le."
She grinned back, "No problem."

pae-a-tolodh: Legolas
From his seat at the swinging ship's table below decks, Gimli thrust a book at Legolas. It was bound in thin wood covered with leaves from Mirkwood trees protected by many coats of varnish. A gift from the Prince of Mirkwood on a birthday. It was full of doodles and drawings and designs for amazing contraptions, most of which had not been built, yet.
"Show me this board contraption you slid on the snow with." he said, handing Legolas a small leather pouch.
Legolas sat across the table, opened the pouch. Inside were half a dozen sticks, two fingers long and half a finger wide; charcoal and other elements pressed into fine sharp drawing tools. Gimli's design.
Better than a pencil, Legolas thought. He doodled the design, from several angles, explaining it and the bindings and boots as he went, passing The Book back and forth across the table to Gimli.
After the candles above them had burned halfway down, he shoved it back across the table to Gimli one last time.
Gimli nodded in satisfaction, he knew how good Elvish memories were. He just hoped that somewhere in the Blessed Realm, there was snow.

The See Longing
Lizard
Movie night at Dana's involves buckets of all-natural popcorn, a big-screen TV, surround sound, and a lot of beanbag chairs. I didn't even know they made those things anymore, but she had a whole living room full of them. Sometimes we dug through her ancient archives; stuff like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone swashing and buckling, or Roy Rogers or Gene Autry singing their way through the old west, or the Seven Samurai fighting evil in ancient Japan. Sometimes we'd have strange foreign films where we had to read the subtitles. And sometimes it'd just be a kaboomfest with somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger in it. The sight of Legolas in shorts and a tank top, sprawled in a hot pink beanbag was worth the price of tonight's admission; bringing a DVD Dana didn't have. The one I'd brought was something we'd all seen a few dozen times in the theater (except of course for the Elf), it was like pirate gold, we couldn't get enough of it.
Besides, it had Orli in it.
I leapt through the door into the kitchen, brandishing my treasured DVD like a cutlass. "Avast!" I said to Dana, "You're off the map now, here there be monsters!"
Dana laughed, Legolas studied me the way an anthropologist might study a member of an obscure tribe who painted themselves blue and ran screaming naked into battle. Lorien stood in the doorway, mouth ajar, words failing to come out. When they finally did she squeaked, "You can't! You can't do that one!" She flapped her hands and mouthed something, her eyes jerking toward Legolas, popping the third bag of microwave popcorn with the intensity of a scientist studying a new cancer cure.
"Flea bonging?" I said.
Legolas looked up.
Lorien shook her head frantically, made a little birdbeak shape by her mouth, flapped her hands some more.
"Sounds like...tweezers...pliers..."
Dana wandered by and thrust a mug of hot chocolate into Lorien's hands. "Don't worry, Lorien, he's already seen Captain Blood and the Sea Hawks, I don't think Pirates of the Caribbean is going to set him off waxing poetic over long sea voyages and western sunsets."
"Are you certain?" Lorien said.
Dana shrugged. "We'll worry about that when we get there. We're kind of in his future, or at least, one branch of it...when he goes back, he may not remember any of this. Or," she said more quietly, "we may have to make sure he doesn't."
"You can do that? Like Professor Xavier, or something?" I said through a mouthful of popcorn.
Dana smiled her Shenzi smile.
"How'd the session with your buddy go?" I asked. I didn't want to think too long about Legolas not remembering any of us. Well, yeah, I didn't want to screw up Middle-earth's future, but hey, I thought it'd be nice if...oh...I don't know.
"Zip, nein, nada, zilch." Dana said. If she'd seen the expression on my face, she didn't show it. "Of course I haven't been able to tell anyone we've got a fictional character hanging out at my place. But nobody knows anything about opening trans-dimensional doorways. Reversing a love spell, that's easy. But this is not a simple love spell, I'm pretty sure. Something more peculiar at work here. I think we need to nail down this Nazgul chick to figure it out." She reached for the fourth bowl of popcorn as Legolas took out another bag. Dana whisked the bag from his hand. "Lorien, please tell him I think we've got enough already."
We schlumped our beanbags into a circle of comfy nests surrounding the Elf. Kodi and Shenzi sprawled on the floor, with their own little piles of popcorn. And since it was my DVD, I wielded the remote. Legolas shoved his beanbag closer and two minutes into the previews said a stream of fluid Elvish and snagged the remote out of my hands. He seamlessly flicked through the menu till he found a short feature that looked interesting. He scanned through it at 8X the normal speed, then did it again for the next feature. We sat up in our beanbags, watching him flick back and forth on the menu.
"Just like this morning. Swear to all the gods, it must be wired into the flamin' y gene." Dana said. "Males." she added, and flumped back into her beanbag. "Wake me when we actually get to the movie."
"Hey," I said, reaching for the remote, "Give it here."
It slipped out of my reach, quick as a fish. I reached again, from a different angle, and Legolas evaded my reach as easily as Nightcrawler evading Juggernaut. "Arrrr." I said, grinning a pirate grin. And reached again. This time he feinted left, then dodged right, and I saw the growing smile on his face.
"That does it." I leapt on him and wrestled him to the floor, like I had a dozen other boys. Only I'd pretty much wanted to kick their butts into the next millennium, and had put a hurtin' on certain parts of their anatomy. I grabbed the remote on the way down. He slipped out of my grasp and then Kodi piled on, arooing with delight. Shenzi lifted her head once, snorted, then went back to sleep. The Prince of Mirkwood caught my leg and flipped me neatly into the next beanbag, and the remote into his hand.
Lorien sat there, staring at us like we'd gone straight over the edge of the Knowne Worlde.
Somewhere in the next hundred and thirty seconds, Legolas ended up sprawled across one puce green beanbag and one Caribbean blue one, legs effectively pinned by Dana, me sitting on his chest, all of us laughing. He looked up into my eyes, his dark in the subdued lighting. The playfull grin, the kind you'd share with a swordbrother, faded.
It was like he'd suddenly remembered I was a girl. He looked kind of embarassed, and said something in Elvish.
"My lady," Lorien said, "and he emphasized Lady..."
He handed me the remote, with a gesture that would have done justice to the presentation of a single perfect rose.
"I yield." Lorien translated, looking peeved.
I glanced away from his eyes and piled off. He rolled gracefully into his own beanbag again, and I flicked the menu to to 'play movie'. I huddled in my beanbag, inches from that lean, hard, graceful body watching Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom kick pirate butt.
I couldn't keep my mind on Orli at all.
One Wing to Fool Them All
Sunday was Family Stuff Day, for both Lorien and me. Her parents had some exciting museum trip planned, and mine had some Hobbit-sized dinner going with the rest of the clan. I grumped through endless variations on "Have some more potatoes." and "How about those Ravens." Kodi lurked under the table wolfing down bits dropped by my youngest cousins. I finally escaped with my cousins to watch Frozen for the 147th time.
Awhile later I called Lorien on the cell, she was yawning at a pre-cambrian sea-bed in the Smithsonian, I was humming mindlessly along with "Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride" in Lilo and Stitch.
My three year old cousin was trying to put her socks on Kodi.
We both had a horrible case of Elf-withdrawal.
"I'm getting him his own cell phone, dammit." Lorien said.
She never says dammit.
I took Kodi for a walk when we got back, just as the sun was going down in fire and ice. I wanted to go over to Dana's, but I had homework from hell to finish before tomorrow. I slipped past Mom and Dad in front of the TV, and managed not to have to explain I'd do the homework later. I pulled on my running shoes, my headlamp, the broad ski-joring belt that Dad had made to hold the two dog line the attached to Kodi's harness. If I skied, it would be called ski-joring. I'd tried it with the snowboard but... nope, Nope Train to Nopeville. So I just ran; it's still a legitimate actual sport they call canicross. Kodi just called it fun. Dad said he'd build a kicksled for me this winter, so Kodi could go faster.
Humans, just too slow.
Out the door, duck under the winter dried hanging flower baskets and the fall banner, past the bird feeders, and the green seahorse birdbath, and the silver gazing globe on its cherub pedestal, hopping down the stepping stones, with their bunny designs, that Mom had placed last summer, through the Siberian proof fence and out to the Wild.
I jogged along the woods trail, imagining Legolas running under the stars in Mirkwood, and wishing he could have come along. My headlamp scribbled amber circles of light on the dark trail, picking out glints of red or green or yellow eyes when I turned toward a sudden sound in the woods. A screech owl sent out a wavering ghost-horse whinny, deer crashed away into the brush. Kodi strained after them.
"On by!" I called to him. Dana's friend Maggie trained sled dogs and that was the command to leave the chipmunk the hell alone and keep running. She'd run Kodi with her team a few times, and I practiced the commands whenever I ran on the trails with him. He reluctantly turned from the deer and trotted down the trail. I broke into a good run. Kodi stretched out ahead, hauling on me like an Iditarod champion, lengthening my own strides. We ran half an hour out into the forest, then turned and came back on the trail that led by the campfire circle.
Suddenly Kodi stopped dead in the middle of the trail.
"On by!" I yelled at him, He stood on his hind legs, staring straight up at the branches overhead.
Squirrels, he did that all the time. "Come on, sausage brains," I hauled at his collar, "Leave the squirrel alone." I looked up, weird...usually you heard them scrambling around like an airborne moose. The tree was silent.
A big bird lifted noisily off from the tree and drifted down the trail, then vanished into the trees.
I couldn't see what color it was in the dusky light, it was just a big dark shadow. Too noisy for an owl.
And I could see the broad shape of the wings...and the tail. Wedge-shaped.
A raven.

"Lorien, what do you know about ravens?" my ear was pasted to my cell phone, and my fingers were desperately trying to remember important stuff about the capital of Nebraska.
"Why are you asking me? You're the one with the hundred and ninety-seven field guides."
"I know that stuff. Peterson's Field Guide to the Eastern Birds, Audobon articles. Raven Darkholme."
"Wha?"
"Mystique's alter-ego. Evil Blue Wench of Doom?
"Shapeshifter? Mother to the hottest Elf since Legolas? Sound familiar?"
"Oh, yeah. Why ravens?"
"I saw her...him, her, again. In the dark, near the campfire circle. And they never fly at night."
"That's odd." I heard silence and could almost smell the brain cells smoking. "Crebain from Dunland."
"Yeah, really."
"Well, I have been reading Bernd Heinrich's 'Mind of the Raven'. Very interesting. Comes recommended by the Smithsonian Magazine. It's..."
"Wonderful. What I really need to know is what are they in mythology?"
"Hmmmm. Odin's Ravens, Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory." Lorien said. "They go with his wolves."
"Isn't he the guy with one eyeball? The one you don't piss off?"
"Anthony Hopkins? Thor's dad, remember? He's the chief of the Norse gods, the Allfather of sky and wind, the ravens bring him messages from the rest of the world."
Oh yeah, they were actually in the films, the Thor films. "Like Saruman's crows." I said.
"Yes. Well, no, mythic Odin's a bit like he was in the films, not evil, even if he did receive the odd bloody sacrifice."
"Yeah, but the ravens are still spies." I was thinking of Nazgul Woman, and her charm spells, and wondering if other people than Elves could talk to animals. I thought of Raven Darkholme too...shapeshifters, and an icy wind walked up my spine.
"Messengers! Not spies." Lorien emphasized. "Campfire circle, that's where you saw her? Odd. No, not odd, that's where you did the spell, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, there's the Morrigan. Celtic goddess of fertility, battle and death. Her bird was the raven."
"Because they were wise, or because they hung out on battlefields picking out people's eyeballs?" I heard the sound of something crashing to the floor.
"I will never be able to eat melon balls again." Lorien said.
"Wonderful."
"Then there's Raven in northwest coast mythology. He's a trickster figure."
"Oh, goodie. This gets better and better."
"No, good. Well, mostly. He steals the sun and moon and stars and puts them in the sky where they belong and helps bring forth the first people."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
"Crebain, from Dunland." I muttered.
"No, wait, in the Hobbit, wise ravens brought messages to the Dwarves."
"Yeah. I just wonder who this raven is bringing messages to." I eyed my bo staff, leaning against the doorframe. I had a feeling I'd better be practicing.

pae-a-neder: Legolas
Elf Defense
The wind had shifted, and the grey ship was no longer beating into the wind, but reaching, with the wind off her starboard side. The keen knife-blade of the bow sliced through quieter waves now, a pod of dolphins riding just before it. Her swan neck stretched west into a red sunset, the wings of her sails amber against an indigo sky sprinkled with the first of Elbereth's stars.
The Elf moved across the deck...no, danced. Coiled and uncoiled like a striking snake. Pounded downward like a breaking wave. Hands moved like falcon talons, like the claws of a great cat. He froze in mid-stride, motionless as if Time itself had stopped, despite the rolling of the ship's deck, and the hard tilt of it as the ship heeled over in the wind. Then he was a blur of motion, faster than the eye could follow. The twin knives flashed, golden lightning bolts in the westering sun. Then he slowed, like a sweep of rain across the grass, drew himself together, rooted as deep as an ancient tree and bowed, westward.
From a secure place at the foot of the mainmast, Gimli spoke, "Why do you still practice? There are no more wars to fight."
Legolas stared west, the ship flew on, the wind blew, he breathed a hundred times, the amber glow of the moonsails high above him deepened, then faded to grey.
Indeed, why? The small changes in his life were beginning to sink in. The things he had done without thought over the centuries, the things that were as much a part of him as breathing. What use were they in this new life? He watched the water change from molten steel with blue-green shadows, to subtle shades of pewter and lavender and rose. Something big rolled up out of the Great Sea and vanished. Something he did not know the name of. And there would be many things he would not know the names of in this new place. He shivered as if a cold wind had touched him.
Gimli's feet clunked on the deck. Legolas turned to see the dwarf staring up at him, endless patience in the mine-jewel glint of his eyes.
"I have always done it." Legolas said. "And it came to us from the Valar in the beginning. It hones the body, enlightens the mind, strengthens the spirit."And I know it, as I know you. It roots me in the familiar. It carries the scent of Mirkwood's trees, the feel of moss-covered rock, the hundred thousand shades of green in the spring. He sighed and looked up at the clouds of sails, grey in the dusk, strung upon masts as great as the ancient trees of Mirkwood, the maze of spars and yards and spreaders, of sheets and shrouds and braces as complex as the woven branches of his woodland home.
Is there room for anything of my old life in Eressea? Or am I about to do something my folk never do...change?

Lizard
It was Day From Hell at school, you know, the kind of day when you've got forty-seven tests, eight tons of homework, every teacher picks on you to answer stupid questions you don't remember being in the book, in any book. Questions that will never have anything to do with real life. The day when all the Barbie clones make a special effort to remind you that pond scum has a better chance of living happily ever after than you do. I couldn't even commiserate with Lorien, she was being dragged off on a shopping expedition. With her grandmother. Gaaaah! That was more like a trek through Mordor than an evening in Rivendell.
It wasn't even my night to do stalls at Dana's, I went anyway.
"He's out back." Dana waved vaguely up toward the hill behind the house.
I pulled Kodi out of the truck, donned my headlamp, then thought better of it. The waxing moon gave a lot of light, and somehow the woods seem more, well...woodsy in the dark. I climbed the slope, wondering how I was going to find a woodelf in all those shadowy acres. Maybe he'd even gone out into the State Forest, running under the stars, like in The Book.
Well, probably Kodi would find him. He plunged ahead, dragging on the line like usual, a huge doggy grin on his face.
Laugh it up, doggyboy, you don't have to deal with Mrs. Smeed. And Tiffany Smith.
Kodi dragged me up, then right, ignoring the rustlings of small things in the leaves, the sudden shadow of a hunting screech owl, and anything that looked like a trail. He plunged through the brush, wrapping the line around every rock and branch he could find, then panting and pulling up the slope while I tried to untangle him in the dark. Near the top, the woods opened up, there was a nearly level place, ringed with mountain laurel and white pine, and carpeted with ferns in the summer. The moon turned the sky to indigo blue, and the ground to dark silver, striped with treeshadow like a tiger's back. Kodi plunged to the edge of it and stopped.
In the open glade, shimmering with moonlight and treeshadow and things I couldn't see, Legolas danced.
Not the blond Legolas who shield-surfed a stairway at Helm's Deep. Not the dark-eyed pin-up actor who smiled from the covers of a dozen magazines. Not even the windblown warrior in the Alan Lee illo in The Book.
This was something straight out of Faerie Tale; all nightshadow and moonglimmer. I heard Lorien again, quoting The Silmarillion, and how mortal Man Beren first saw Luthien, Daughter of Elvenking Thingol.
I stood, frozen, in the shadows of the pines, Kodi sat as if carved from stone. Legolas knew I was there, he had to, but the dance didn't falter. He moved like a shadow under the trees. Like a hunting cat. Like a striking falcon. He wielded two longknives, or something similar, and they flashed through the striped treeshadow faster than sight. He leaped and spun and landed with as much sound as owlflight. It was a kata, a martial arts form that would have had Jackie Chan openmouthed with awe. I reached out to the nearest tree and leaned on it. And thought how it felt when Legolas touched my hand and I was the tree.
Legolas wasn't dancing in the glade, he was the glade, woven into it like the treeroots and moonlight and the tiny hunting screech owl. He wove the kata the way Dana wove the intricate spiral of a dreamcatcher from a single piece of thread.
He finally slowed, a heron drawing itself up into a hunting pose, he stood, one-legged, and Time froze with him.
When he bowed, west, I think, I breathed again, and realized I was shivering, and not just from the late night chill. He raised his eyes, faint star glints in a shadowed face, and looked at me.
Through me.
I'd thought I understood Elf...
You know; tall and fair and wise, good paddler, awesome archer, talks to horses and trees. Or maybe the blue fuzzy one who's warm and funny and cuddly and can do a triple backflip without breaking a sweat.
Yeah, I understood this whole Elf thing about as well as I understood quantum physics. I thought about turning around and melting back into the trees. Except it would be more like crashing, at least compared to him. I took a step back.
"Tolo." he said softly, "Come."
I wandered uncertainly into the middle of the clearing. It was hard to look up at him, into his eyes, and harder to look away.
Kodi grinned up at him and Legolas knelt and circled the dog with an arm, grinning back, and looking almost like the dark-haired guy in Wellies I'd seen in the barn all week. He sheathed the two objects he'd been wielding, his knives from Dana, perfect copies of the ones Legolas had used in the movies; when he was blond, and Orlando Bloom.
I really, really wished I'd paid more attention to things like glosseopaeia, or at least the lines in the movie. I frowned at the soft litter of pine needles on the forest floor. I wondered what Tiffany Smith would do right now.
Kodi arrooed and stuck his nose in Legolas face, and washed it with an enormous length of rose petal tongue. The Elf laughed, low and sweet, like a horse chuckle. He said something to Kodi, then did the thing you never do with Siberians. He let him off the leash. Unhooked the tugline and let him run. Kodi danced around him, ar-ara-rooing in his best wookiee accent. Legolas reached into the leaf litter and found a stick, then the two of them danced around the clearing like young wolves, leaping and evading, catching and missing and whirling in a mad predatory dance.
I knew what Tiffany Smith would do, she'd flee in panic. I watched them leaping around the clearing, feinting and dodging, like Legolas on the wall at Helm's Deep. No, more fluid, faster. I'd copied the moves from the film and done them a hundred times, but I could never look like that.
The Wild Wargs of the Woods came over and stood before me, laughing silently, leaves in their hair.
I stood, words dammed up like the river before the ents broke the dam at Isengard. I wanted to say something like...something classy, something Deep and Meaningful, like you'd hear in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', or the very first Star Wars movie; Oh Great Master, teach me the ways of the Force.
I stood there feeling only a little brighter than pond scum.
Legolas laid his hands over mine, "What?" he asked.
I looked up into a face full of shadows and star-glint and said, "Ahhh..."
He studied my face for a moment as if trying to read my thought, then drew me out into the center of the clearing. He paused long enough to look at Kodi, "Dartho!" he said. Kodi did something he never does, he dropped to the ground and lay there like a Siberian Sphinx.
"Here." Legolas said. He drew his knives with hands that moved faster than sight. I remembered that line from the book, and it was true. He stepped back into a stance that looked utterly natural, and somehow looked like a cat about to pounce.
The cat pounced, in slow motion, swept the knives in a tight coiling arc and lashed out with the speed of a dream. He came back to a stance that made me think of herons. Then handed me the knives without a word.
I was pretty good at watching someone, and then doing what I saw. It worked for riding; every winning rider at the shows had been logged somewhere in my memory, and once or twice those riders found themselves beaten by someone they had unknowingly trained.
But then I wasn't trying to copy an Elf.
As I tried, over and over, to repeat the moves he'd just shown me, I came to the conclusion that the Elves were actually descended from sharks, or jellyfish, or some other lifeform that didn't have bones.
Nobody could move like that.
Or maybe they could, if they had five hundred years to practice.
He shadowed me, mirroring my moves, or the ones I was supposed to be doing. He danced at my shoulder, close enough to touch, and yet never there when I reached out clumsily with the knives. His shadowed face was as cool as a hawk on the wind, and he did not once laugh, even when I tripped over a tree root and landed on my sorry butt.
He reached a hand down and lifted me up as easily as a feather.
The moonshadow moved across the ground, and the sky brightened to deep blue-silver overhead. A distant hoo hoo-hoo-hoo hoo HOO! shattered the silence. Another great horned owl, closer, answered. Deer stepped out of the shadows at the edge of the clearing for a moment, staring in surprise, then moved on. A rambling skunk drifted under the laurel and waddled down the hill. A silver-furred possum appeared, sniffing at us with a face full of whiskers, then trundled off on its pink daisy hands. In a most un-Siberian manner, Kodi ignored all of them; he sat, still as stone, watching us. We danced on. Gradually the moves came easier. They piled one on another; heron and owl and striking snake, deep-rooted tree and sinuous vine and slinking cat, horse and elk, grasshopper and mantis. Or at least, that's what I think they were. Sometimes Legolas would stop and try to describe the animal form, sometimes I would get it, and sometimes I was sure he was describing a jellyfish or an armadillo.
And I was really sure there wasn't any such thing as a clam form.
I swung the knives faster now, though not as fast as the Elf. I stepped through the moonshadow with somewhat more grace than a bounding dumptruck. I leapt like 'aras' and struck like 'brog'.Floated like 'gwilwering' and snapped like 'half'.
Yeah, there really was a clam form.
Legolas suddenly stood, staring down the hill as if he had heard something in the dark.
My hand went to Dana's charm, inside my shirt, but it lay cool and silent.
Legolas said. "We should go."
I handed him back the knives, suddenly feeling how tired I was. Kodi rose from his place under the laurel and grinned up at us.
Legolas laid an arm across my shoulder, the warm, fierce embrace of a swordbrother. "Mae carnen, mae carnen, mellon nin." he said, "Well done, my friend." Then he turned and headed down the hill, Kodi at his heels, and just slow enough for me to keep up.
We reached Dana's yard, she stood by the big dinner bell at the gate, yawning. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"
I dug in my pocket for the watch I'd ditched there. "Ack!"
Legolas looked at the sky, then at Dana. He looked like Shenzi when she'd been caught with most of the Thanksgiving turkey on the floor.
"Not everyone runs on Elvish Time." Dana said pointedly.
He gave her a smile, the kind that would have melted a glacier in Antarctica.
Uh ohhhhh...I know my Mom called, about five dozen times. And what would Dana have told her? I was out in the woods with some guy in the middle of the night.
Ack! "We were, ahhhh..."
"I told your Mom you were working late on a school project." Dana was staring at Legolas with the kind of look that could have frozen Smaug in his tracks.
"Uh...thanks." I said, snapping the lead back on Kodi. "I mean, we were, sort of..."
Dana eyed the Elf, and the sheathed knives, "Don't mention it."
"GottagoSeeyatomorrow!" I ran for the truck. Dana gave me a Shenzi look, reached up and took Legolas' shoulder in a firm grip and went back up the walk to the house.

Women Who Run With the Elves
All the adventures in Lorien's life, so far, had pretty much occurred between the pages of a book, or online. Her pudgy little butt showed it. Suddenly, she wanted to try real hands-on adventure, horsemanship, archery, even the kata I'd just learned...
...as long as there was an Elf involved.
She blearily trailed me to Dana's for morning chores, just so she could come after school and shovel more poop, then go out into the big arena under the lights and heave herself onto Pumpkin and crash through a few more poles and cavallettis in Dana's obstacle course. Legolas followed her on Beo, calling out encouragement in two languages, and demonstrating proper seat, legs and hands with his own (extremely lucious) body.
Which Lorien had got a lot of pictures of. About a whole boxful of computer disks by now, I think. Well, at least she made me copies.
Meanwhile, I exercised one of the boarders' new horses, a high-powered Thoroughbred hunter whose young rider had parents with too much money and not enough horse sense. Dana figured I was getting a little bored with Cherokee and needed a Learning Experience.
Oh Noooo! Not another Learning Experience...
After a week, Lorien could walk, trot and even canter through the course. The big blue barrels stayed upright, the rails stayed perched on their piles of tires, and the pole-bending poles stayed balanced in their concrete-filled paint cans. And there were pictures of her, taken by Legolas, to prove it.
After a week, Legolas and Beo could do a second level dressage test; riding perfect circles and lines, in perfect rhythm and balance, like a dance, and all without saddle or bridle. And there were pictures of him, taken by Lorien, to prove it.
After a week, Loki had dumped me three times, played soccer with the blue barrels, frisbee with the tires, and scattered the pole-bending poles like orc spears after a battle. And there were no pictures to prove it, because I had wrestled the camera out of Lorien's hands and erased them.
Yeah, ok, you name a horse after the Norse god of havoc and general mayhem and see what happens.
I sat on a big blue plastic barrel that the blasted beast had just spooked at, run over top of, and wrecked like a Volkswagon Bug chewed on by Smaug. Loki stood, flame-red mane tumbled over half closed eyes as if nothing had happened. He yawned. I considered how many Siberians he could feed for a month.
Stupid horse.
On the other side of the arena, Lorien was doing a nice job of weaving between the pole-bending poles, without bending any of them. Legolas was pantomiming leg and rein movements, and calling commands.
Stupid Elf.
No, I did not just think that.
Oh, yeah, I did. Somewhere in the deep dark sub-basement of my subconcious, an evil green-eyed dragon snorked a great cloud of jealous vapor. I punched it squarely in its smoking little nose and locked the door on it. After all, this was my best buddy we were talking about.
Best buddies.
And Dana said I knew enough to figure out what to do with Loki myself. I stared glumly up at Loki. He twitched an ear and snorted straight in my face.
Oh great, horse snot on my face was really going to impress the hell outta the Elf.
Stupid horse, he could probably keep a whole Iditarod team fed for about twelve hundred miles.
Lorien let out a laugh from the other side of the arena, and did a nice little hop over a foot high cavalletti.
I could just go over there and beg for help. Legolas had run over when I'd got dumped, but I'd waved him off. Right now I was trying to remember why.
Oh yeah. Impress him with your bravery and horsemanship talent.
I never said I was particularly brilliant. Anyway, I figured he was busy with Beo and Lorien and I was supposed to be a Nearly Professional Horseman. I could figure it out myself.
Loki snorted again.
I stood and grabbed a chunk of mane at the base of Loki's neck, got a foot in the stirrup and started to swing up. Loki danced in a jittery circle, I hopped after him. On the umpteenth revolution, Lorien and Pumpkin appeared, like a small planet in the middle of our erratic moon-mad orbit.
"Want some help?" she said.
"Oh. No. I'm doing just fine." I said through my teeth. Loki did a nifty little scuttle-hop, the safety stirrup's rubber band twanged like a bowstring and I landed on my butt. Loki danced off to mangle some more scenery.
Pumpkin stared after him like a disapproving grandmother. Legolas reached a hand down to me. I stood, he cocked one eyebrow. Just one, just a hair. Sweet. It almost made me forget my aching butt.
"Ok. I give up." I said to him. "What is wrong with that, that, that bug-brained piece of dogfood on the hoof?"
Legolas stared after Loki for a few hundred heartbeats. Loki flattened all the poles Lorien had just woven through without touching. Legolas looked back at me, "Have you listened to him?"
"Unlike some people here, I do not speak Equine."
"You do." Lorien said, "I've seen it. You know when Pumpkin is going to break three strides before she does it."
"That's reading body language."
"Same thing. At least, it's part of it." she glanced at Legolas for confirmation.
Legolas nodded.
I want to do more, I want to hear what they're thinking. I want to know what it's like to be the horse. I want to leap on a small but restive and fiery warhorse without saddle or rein and have him not mangle the big blue barrels. I want the Elvish Way With All Good Beasts. I let out a frustrated sigh.
"Want some help?" Legolas said, echoing Lorien.
Lorien dismounted. I noticed it was much smoother than the night we'd ridden out on the trail to meet Nazgul Barbie. She kept Pumpkin's reins in one hand instead of dropping them where the mare could step on them. Lorien stood in front of me trying her best to look like a noble knight. "You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin...to the bitter end."
"Whaa?"
"Sam Gamgee. A Conspiracy Unmasked." she beamed her Quoting From The Book smile.
"Yeah...ok."
Legolas wandered across the arena to where Loki was trying to reach through the fence to a sprig of grass. He caught the reins, still looped across Loki's neck and ambled back to us, Loki in tow, bouncing like a boat in rough seas. Legolas ignored the ditzy dance and came to a halt before us.
"What does his name mean?" he asked me.
"Loki? Norse god of general mayhem and wreckage." I answered, I failed to mention the part about Tom Hiddleston being nearly as hot as Legolas (or that he could probably play this version of Legolas).
Lorien launched into a brief, for her...that is to say about ten minutes worth of...dissertation on Norse mythology. Legolas listened intently, his attention never wavering. Ten minutes probably was nothing for an Elf.
Loki twitched, fidgeted, stomped at an imaginary fly. And twitched and fidgeted some more.
The Lecture of Lorien ended at last.
"We should change his name." Legolas said.
"Yeah, really. Maybe Smaug." He was a sort of a dragonish bright red chestnut. And the general attitude matched.
"That won't help!" Lorien said. She scrunched her eyebrows and thought till I was sure I could see smoke coming out of her ears. "We need something...nice!"
"Ron Weasley. He's a redhead..."
Lorien's expression screamed Train to Nopeville.
"Something...beautiful." Legolas said.
I thought about the way Loki moved, when he wasn't crashing through poles or kicking barrels. Like an Elf, lean and leggy and smooth. I said, "How do you say 'float'?"
"Loda." Legolas and Lorien said together.
"Whoa, even sounds like his old name, so he might recognize it." In Loki's case, it probably didn't matter, he didn't even recognize his original name. "Yeah, Loda."
We stood in a circle, the newly named Loda in the center. Legolas stared at him for a long minute, then pulled the bridle off and waved him and Beo away. Loda set out across the arena in a long floating trot, reached the fence, dived left and hopped like a drunken frog over a few downed cavalletti rails. Beo twitched his ears as if he thought Loda was an idiot, and floated over the same rails, touching none. Beside us, Pumpkin fell asleep on her feet.
We watched them for the next half hour; Loda trotting, then cantering, then dashing in a mad gallop, then slowing to a mindless, wandering jog. Beo trotted elegantly around the fence, then switched directions with a subtle body signal from Legolas. Loda noticed none of this, and copied less. Legolas would occasionally step forward to push Loda in a new direction, or encourage him to move if he stopped. After a few minutes Legolas started telling us what he saw.
"Basically," I said, "You're telling us he has three working brain cells."
Legolas gave me a blank look. "Huh?" he said.
"I think cellular biology is something the Elves hadn't gotten around to yet." Lorien said.
Oh. Yeah. He had no idea what a cell was. I guess Elves just had telescopic vision, not microscopic.
"You're saying he's beautiful, athletic, and smart as a rock." Lorien said.
Legolas nodded. "I have heard the whispers of stones with more thought behind them."
"Wonderful." I said.
"So, what do we do?" Lorien asked.
Legolas rounded him up again, which took another half hour. Loda apparently didn't recognize the existence of the Elvish Way With All Good Beasts. We finally went back to the barn, three horses, and the Three Friends. Lorien put Pumpkin up in her stall, and I led Beo back to his. Legolas stood in the center aisle, one beautiful hand on Loda's forehead, contemplating his three working brain Elf was wearing an expression I never expected to see on his face; total perplexity.
"You must have met horses like this before." I said hopefully.
"No." he said.

taphae: Legolas
"Was this like those strange little hairy dogs you were telling me about?" Gimli stood on a box, peering under Legolas' elbow at the binnacle which held the navigational instruments. Tomorrow he meant to ask the ship's navigator how they worked.
Legolas wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled week old dead fish. "Yes. Some of the Edain there bred strange creatures, forgetting what made the First Dogs, or First Horses, strong. This horse's family had been bred for speed, and they had completely forgotten the brains."
"What did you do? Feed him to the dogs, as Lizard suggested?" Gimli's expression plainly showed that would have been the practical thing to do.
The Elf looked appalled. "No! Liz was frustrated, for she had tried all she knew, and for one so young...younger than I when I trained my first wild horse...she knew a great deal." A gentle smile came to his face, "And she could hear their thought, though she did not know it. She would no more feed even the most orcish horse to the dogs than eat her own dog. And she did not strike him as I have seen some Edain do. I studied him for awhile, and she watched. Finally she came and caught my hand..."

Lizard
I thought of the time, barely two weeks ago, when I had been the tree. I caught his hand, laid on Loda's fidgety head, and said, "Show me what he's thinking." Maybe it was a little pushy, maybe it wasn't something you just did to the Son of the King of All the Elves of Northern Mirkwood, but I didn't care. I wanted to know what the bloody beast's problem was and how to fix it. And probably, Loda would still be here, with his air-headed attitude, when Legolas was safely back in his Mirkwood bath. To their credit, neither one of them kicked me across the barn. I laid my hand over Legolas' long-fingered one, and he freed his other and laid it over mine.
The world shifted under me, melted, and changed to black and white.
It was like looking into the mind of Tiffany Smith, or how I imagined it would be; all air and nothingness. It was like being in the big blue end of the pool with no clear idea of which way was up. I hung there forever, waiting for a thought to swim by, and none did. Then something big and predatory moved, just out of sight, and I had an insane urge to run away. The predator vanished, and I thought of food, and running to find it. Then the big blue nothing again, but I was running, running, running in the middle of it. Then food, then a memory of something moving that I had to run from: my tiny shred of human awareness recognized it as a plastic shopping bag.
I came up for air, and the warm orange of the barn lights was as welcome as spring sun. "Whoa!"
"What?" Lorien demanded. She looked faintly peeved. She looked like I felt when she and Legolas had long conversations in Elvish.
"If you lined up blonds from Rivendell to Mirkwood and looked in the ear of the one in Rivendell, what would you see?"
"Uh, Legolas in a bathtub? Assuming the last blond has her ear to the, um, bathroom keyhole, that is."
I stared at her, shocked that any of her fantasies could be rated more than G.
Legolas came around Loda's neck and stared at her. "Bathtub?" he said.
"Nevermind." we said in unison.
"Loda." I said, hoping Legolas would forget the bathtub.
"What do you think?" he said.
I was going to ask him that, he was the one with what, five hundred years of experience talking to rocks and trees. Ok, so the trees were smarter than Loda. Maybe even the rocks. "There's a lot of empty."
"What is empty can be filled." Legolas said.
Sindarin Zen. "You sure?"
He thought about that one for a minute. "Usually."

Loda continued to be unaware of the Elvish Way With All Good Beasts. The three of us met every day now at Dana's, poop patrol days and in between. Lorien learned to ride, Beo made four foot jumps, shoulder-ins and extended trots look easy, and Loda bent more scenery, while Legolas and I sat in the center of the arena and watched him. None of us were any closer to figuring out what would fill the big blue empty in his head.
"Screw it." I said on the fourth night. "I'm going for a run."
Lorien trotted over on Pumpkin, sat down and did a nice halt without hauling on the reins.
Legolas stood, stretched like a cat, "Good idea. My brain is fried."
Lorien looked at me. "If we get him home, if I pick up The Book and he says 'my brain is fried' to Strider, I will personally come over to your house and paint your bedroom puke pink."
We let Loda the Airhead back in his stall and headed out the back. I caught Kodi on the way, and we plunged down the trail in the dark, Kodi in the lead, Legolas behind me, and Lorien jogging along on Pumpkin.
The barn lights faded behind us, the night opened before us. The big, waning moon wasn't up yet, but I knew this trail, even in the dark. The steady rhythm of Kodi's trot came through the line like electricity. Pumpkin's soft beat shadowed it, my own legs stretched into their rhythm; breathe one two three four, breathe one two three four. Legolas was a silent shadow, inches behind me, I could see him if I turned my head.
And I could...feel him. The way I felt the roots of the tree and the stretch of its branches. The way I felt where each foot of a horse was when I rode.
Breathe one two three four, breatheonetwothreefour...
An owl called, deer crashed away into the darkness.
Breatheonetwothreefour...
Mrs. Smeed and Tiffany Smith and Loda and Nazgul Barbie fell away into grey nothingness.
Breathonetwothreefour...
The rhythm of our feet was the music of a hunter's ground-eating trot, the wolf who could run all night, the Iditarod team who could make nearly 1200 miles in nine days.
The Three Friends who ran forty leagues and five, chasing a band of orcs and two hobbits.
Breatheonetwothreefour...
Breath and legs and heart beat out the music. Nightwind harmonized, an owl punctuated it like a big baritone sax.
Breatheonetwothreefour...
And suddenly I knew what Loda needed. Loda needed to run.
He had been bred for running and nothing else. "So we let him," I said to Legolas when we reached the barn again.
He gave me a long wise look. Then he smiled, like a kid who's just been handed the keys to a Ferrari.
In the morning, Lorien and I yawned through stalls, then went off to school, to do battle with Tiffany, Smeed & Co. Legolas waved at us from the edge of the woods, Loda dancing in volcanic circles under him. Legolas had a solid hold on a set of reins, but, as usual, no saddle.
When we came back that evening, Loda was snoring in his stall.
I watched Legolas going down the aisle with a bale of hay. "Is he walking funny?"
Lorien watched his retreating butt a little longer than I quite thought was necessary to make a diagnosis.
"Yeah." she said. "Kind of like a cowboy who hasn't got off his horse in years."
He came back up the aisle looking just short of grim.
"So, ummm," I asked him, "How far did you ride?"
His face twitched faintly, it almost looked like a wince. "Until he stopped."
"Pretty far, huh?"
His eyes were an odd greenish color, like a bruise. "I never saw why Men felt the need for saddle-trees and stirrups."
I raised an eyebrow. Stirrups raised you up off the horse's back, let you float over the bumpity-bump, instead of getting your butt...or other parts, if you were male...bruised.
Legolas eyed Loda and let out a long sigh, "Until now."

We nearly forgot about silver ravens and pick clad Nazgul. And they apparently had forgotten about us.

Of Herbs and Stewed Bambis
Lizard
"Saturday, bring feasting clothes when you come to the barn. Dana says we're doing Thanksgiving with the Indians."
The voice on the cell phone was male and familiar and had finally figured out how to work that peculiarly shaped palantir. He was also, after less than a month in Yrch County, making better use of the English language than most of the males I knew; usually they just kind of grunted at you in monosyllables.
"Native Americans." Lorien corrected. We were huddled in a far corner of the lunch room, the table frequented by kids whose best friends were online somewhere in Fiji or New Zealand; who could describe the workings of the Enterprise D's hyperdrive in terrifying detail; or who knew what xerophilous meant, and could spell it; or the ones who dressed mostly in piercings and black and summoned the odd demon on full moons.
I shrugged. "All the older generation grew up being called Indians, so that's what they still say."
"They'd really rather be identified by their tribe; Lakota or Haliwa Saponi, or Haudeenosaunee, or Onondaga, or Dine, or Kwakiutl. Most of those names mean the same thing: the Real People, and..."
I hate it when she goes into Lecture Mode. "Whatever." I said. "Most of the ones I met liked to be called Fred or George or Bev."
"We went to a Sundance last year in DC, it was..."
...time to stuff the rest of my deer bologna sandwich in Lorien's mouth. Even if she was a vegetarian.
Lorien and I trotted into the barn at 8am for the morning chores. Kodi tugged on the lead, lurching toward the intoxicating smell of horse. I hauled him back, trying to convince him he really couldn't catch one, and if he did, it would be way more than he could eat. Dana was already off in the big sand-floored arena, with its windscreen of pine trees, giving the first, and only, class of the day. I heard a clear male voice, singing cheerfully from the wash stall. It sounded like the latest boy band... I never remember their names but the earworms are kind of like a bad case of tapeworm.
"Oh no." Lorien said, "Middle-earth is so screwed."
Lorien never says screwed.
I went over to the wash stall, wondering who would be getting a bath on a cold November morning with no horse shows in sight. Kodi dragged a little harder at the lead than usual. Legolas was perched on a stool in the middle of the stall, cheerfully dismembering a deer.
Lorien ploughed to a halt on my heels and let out a "Waaughhh!" of distress.
Kodi stood up on his hind legs, leaning hard in the direction of fresh prey.
Legolas looked up at us, startled. The buffalo bow hung on a convenient tack hook, with the quiver beside it. A few late fall leaves were still stuck on it, and one arrow lay on a shelf, drying.
"Bbbbbambi." Lorien croaked. She grabbed my arm. Both of them.
Kodi took this opportunity to plunge into the wash stall and claim a portion of the kill.
"He killed Bambi!"
Legolas motioned to Kodi and he sat, looking disgruntled.
"Uh oh." I said. "This could be a problem."
"What?" Legolas said.
"Waugh!" Lorien said.
"I mean, you haven't got a hunting license."
Kodi yawned, who cared about Human Rules, he fixed ice-blue eyes on Legolas. 'You WILL share some of that, won't you? It's the rules of the pack.'
"License? I need a...one of those strange runic metal plates, as on cars?" Legolas said.
"No, no, a little paper one in a plastic pouch to stick on your camo hat...oh nevermind. You don't exist...at least as far as the Game Commission is concerned, therefore you can't get a hunting license."
"Oh." he knifed off a sliver of venison and tossed it to Kodi, "Why does Lorien look like she is surrounded by orcs?"
"She's a vegetarian."
Kodi snorted.
"What?"
"She doesn't believe in killing things to eat, except plants."
"Oh. How odd."
Kodi let out an aroooo! of agreement.
Legolas tossed him another piece.
"Yeah, tell me about it." I said.
Legolas went back to detaching the left haunch from the rest of Bambi. It was rather messy, which is why he'd chosen to do it in the wash stall. So he could hose everything down afterwards. He paused, and threw Kodi another bite.
Lorien had gone up the scale from beach-sand pale to Galadriel-in-the-moonlight-pale to downright vampiric.
"Uh, I guess we could pretend it's Dana's deer, I mean, she has a hunting license."
Kodi was demonstrating the origins of the phrase 'wolfing down your food'.
Legolas nodded. "Do you think this will be enough for us to bring to the Feast of Thanksgiving?"
"Um, yeah. Probably." Probably we'd have leftovers for a year, for every Indian in Yrch County. It was a really big, fat deer. One of the ones who hung out in the locals' corn fields no doubt.
Lorien turned and fled toward the bathroom. I'd never seen anyone quite that shade of green before.

Bambi had been turned into nice neat portable packages, suitably sized for oven or frypan. The dogs had been safely stowed in the kennel. The rest of us had found clean jeans and boots, except for Lorien in her wool wolf socks and Teva sandals, and Legolas who had fallen hard for the Goddess of Victory, Nike. He had left his snowboarder hat behind, and Dana had turned his long dark hair into an elegant braid.
"Hey," I said, "What did you do to his ears?"
They were decidedly not leaf-shaped anymore.
"Spirit Glue." Dana said.
"I hope this has nothing to do with dead horses." Lorien glowered at me. Ever since she'd figured out how to steer Pumpkin, she'd been reading every horse book she could get her hands on, and watching every movie that had a leg at each corner and a whinny. She'd kind of overdosed on that Spielberg cartoon.
"No, no, it's something actors use." Dana said, "One of my friends used it at a science fiction convention last year. You just roll your ear a little and glue it and tah dah! Instant Vulcan. Or Elf; D&D, fuzzyblue, or Middle-earth. I just did the reverse on Legolas."
I looked closer, yeah, it looked pretty good. I just hoped the glue would hold.
Dana went on packing her huge basket, "With any luck, there'll be some people there today who might have some ideas on our problem. Grab those boxes and that bag over there."
I did and we followed her out the door. We climbed into Dana's Dragon, the big red truck that pulled the trailer for shows. Lorien and I squished into the jump seats behind the front seat, Legolas peered out the window at the scenery, zooming by at sixty. He was not clutching the dash anymore, I noticed. He was pointing at every sign along the road going, "What does that say?"
Dana patiently fired back translations.
I never realized before how much there is to read in this culture. And how little of it is worth reading.
The church parking lot was full of typical greyish-tan sedans, SUVs, beat-up trucks, Jeeps, vans, old cars, a converted schoolbus painted bright purple. Bumper stickers read; we're still here, Custer wore arrow shirts, welcome to Turtle Island, Proud to be Cherokee, sure you can trust the government; ask any Indian.
Legolas kept pointing to bumper stickers and asking, "What does this say?" Then frowning, "I don't get it. Wait, what's this one..."
Dana caught his arm and dragged him toward the door of the feast hall. "Later." she said.
Lorien giggled, "It looks like that scene where he tried to ride back into the huorn wood and Gandalf wouldn't let him."
I reran the movie in my head and couldn't find the scene, not even in the extended DVD. Well there was that quick cut to his astonished face when he saw the huorns in the DVD, but I didn't remember him riding into them. "Huh?"
"The Book, dodo."
"Oh. Yeah."
Lorien looked smug.
And I couldn't even go home and look it up. The Book was changed. All because of me. Ack. I stared at the handwoven dreamcatcher dangling from a rearview mirror on the beat up truck beside me. At its bottom floated four handpainted miniature redtail hawk feathers. I hoped Dana was right. I really hoped that somewhere, in some shred of knowledge that had survived religious suppression, boarding schools and potlatch bannings...that somewhere down there in the half-forgotten shadows was the trail back to Mirkwood.
I hefted a second box of Bambi-bits, and headed for the door of the church social hall, Legolas and Dana just ahead, Lorien trotting to catch up. I stopped.
Picture a video game. Picture the little graphs and numbers on the edges that tell you how much ammo and life and stuff you have left. You never look at those. You just fly down the middle, blowing up aliens. One of those little numbers started flashing on the edge of my mental video screen. Flashing really loud and annoyingly. I glanced at it, then looked again. I looked up.
A silvery bird circled over the parking lot. Tilted, grey against the pale noon sky. Lorien saw me.
"What..." she began.
I moved, faster than Cherokee spooking from a blowing bit of plastic bag. I dropped the Bambi-box, grabbed Legolas, already halfway up the steps, and shoved him through the door.
Somewhere behind me, a seagull wheeled and wailed, and headed for Burger King.

...and Rangers and Sidekicks
We stumbled through the double doors in exactly the way Princes of even small woodland kingdoms never do. Legolas spun, caught himself, and his box of Bambiburgers, and me, dropped the box, caught the arm of an elderly lady whose trajectory had crossed ours, steadied her, then caught Lorien as she blew through the door, and dropped the second box of Bambi on my feet. He gave me a look that clearly said, the gerbils in your brain have fallen off their little wheels.
"What bug flew up your nose?" Lorien snapped.
"A seagull." I said, rolling my eyes skyward in a meaningful way.
"Oh."
"Aseegoll?" Legolas asked. "What?"
"Nothing." Lorien and I said in unison. We turned and looked across the room.
About fifty people were staring at us. Legolas gave them a huge smile, honed by centuries of princely diplomacy. They went back to the business of cooking and setting up tables and chairs and decorations and watching children and chattering among themselves...except for about a dozen women, whose eyes stayed glued on Legolas, even while their hands did other things. I picked up Bambibox A and headed for the kitchen. Behind me Legolas picked up Bambibox B and followed. Dana was already exchanging hugs and hellos with various folk in the big hall. In one corner, a young woman and a couple of guys were setting up a drum bigger than a Hobbit birthday cake. Legolas eyed it curiously.
"You have anything like that at home?" I asked him.
"Not quite. Not that big." he hefted the heavy box easily on one hip and walked over. He stood watching the guys set up the low wooden stand; two crossed pieces of wood, making an X pointing to the four directions. They set the big circle of the drum over it, a circle of chairs around it. The girl, a few years older than me and Lorien I guessed, smiled at us.
No, at Legolas.
One guy, young, slender, skin the color of beautifully baked bread, with a black braid half the length of Legolas' looked at him, his expression about as readable as an alligator's.
They paused, facing each other, two young warriors; one in copper, one in silver. There was something eerily similar about them. Maybe it was the stance, the cheekbones, or the long dark hair. Or the fact that they both came from cultures with deep roots in the natural world. Or that I associated bows with both.
And solitary Rangers.
I had a sudden awful vision of Strider, in a mask, yelling "Hi-yo Shadowfax!"
Urgh. I punched the stereotype squarely in the jaw and sent it back down where it'd come from. I smiled at Cute Drum Guy. He didn't notice. He was holding an eyelock with Legolas. I'd never seen anybody do that yet. Usually they looked away pretty quick, as if they'd looked into the space between the stars and got vertigo.
"Lemme guess," he said at last to Legolas, "Your Grandma was a Cherokee Princess..."
An eyebrow twitched, but Legolas didn't shift his gaze. "Not likely." His face had that hawk look, the one I always pictured on him when Eomer said are you Elvish folk? and he didn't mean it as a compliment.
Lorien galumped up behind me, "The cooks want Bam...what?"
"Drum Guy thinks Legolas is from the Great Tribe Wannabe." I told her.
"Huh?"
"You know, all those people who've got a Cherokee Princess tucked away in their family tree."
"Cherokee? Mine's Onondaga."
I gave her a Meaningful Stare.
"Really. My great grandmother on my Dad's side..."
I elbowed her in the ribs. Drum Guy still hadn't noticed us, or dropped his eyelock. Two of the other guys setting up the drum exchanged glances and went back to what they were doing. The girl, long-legged and jean-clad, rolled dark eyes in annoyance and stalked off toward the kitchen.
Legolas' face shifted suddenly, as if he'd seen something in Drum Guy's eyes, a slow smile spread over it like sunshine on a grey meadow. He balanced the Bambibox on one hand, and proffered it to Drum guy. "We brought this for the feast. I'm not sure who to give it to."
The box was moving in a manner which meant the one at the end of its path would have to take it, or have it drop on his feet. Drum Guy reached involuntarily and caught the box. His eyes bugged slightly and lost their hold on Legolas'. I think I heard a slight, 'ooof! ' He juggled the box frantically for a few seconds, then looked up at Legolas.
The Elf was beaming sweetly.
Drum Guy gave him a sharp nod and carried the box to the kitchen. I hoisted mine and followed.
I glanced over my shoulder, Legolas and Lorien were talking to one of the other guys on the drum. This one was smiling and waving his arms like a storyteller. It occurred to me Lorien was sandwiched between the two cutest guys left in the room.
The kitchen was full of bustle and busy and grandmas doing what grandmas do on major holidays. There was the rattle of dishes and the sizzle of frybread dropping into hot oil. Ahhhh, frybread. The recipe varies, but mostly it's flour and salt and water and baking soda. You knead it and flatten it into a round pancakish looking thing, and drop it into a pan of hot oil. It comes out golden and hot and you can put a blizzard of powdered sugar on it or a drizzle of honey or pile it high with taco fixings. A small bit of it could fuel an assault on Caradhras or Mordor.
There's nothing like it anywhere in the Known Universe.
I followed Drum Guy and left Bambi on a table with cakes and pies and candied yams and three kinds of corn pudding. Within a minute, somebody's grandma had me flipping frybread in one of the pans on the stove. I hummed something vague and poked the flat bread around like a raft on a pond. Around me bustled women of all ages, with hair in braids, or loose, or in stylish short cuts; black or brown or silver or white, one blond (natural). Jeans, skirts, khakis, ribbon shirts. Short, tall, stout, fat, skinny. Lakota, Saponi, Iroquois, Lumbee, Scottish, German, English, African, French, and every combination you could imagine. Kids ran in and out, snagging snacks, making the kind of general chaos kids do. Somebody started cooking up Bambi. I realized the song I was humming to myself wasn't in English.
It was Sindarin. Something I'd heard Legolas singing this last week.
"What's that?" came a voice over my shoulder. A long slender hand poked at the small pile of frybread lying beside my pan.
Without thinking I swatted it away. "Not yet." I said, "That's for dinner."
"Just a taste?"
I looked up into puppy eyes. Damn, I didn't know Elves could do that. "Here." I made a little pat of dough and dropped it into the pan. Fried it to a nice golden brown, pulled it out. "Try it with honey, over there." I pointed.
He did, chewing it up with thoughtful satisfaction. His eyes lit up, a look of astonishment crossed his face, "I didn't know the Edain could make this!"
"What?"
"Lembas!"

taphae-a-min: Legolas
"Lembas?" Gimli said through a mouthful of lembas. The dining table belowdecks swung gently on hithlain ropes, swaying with the roll of the ship, quieter now in the dark under the stars. "You mean waybread, cram such as the Men of Dale make. Or the honeycakes of the Beornings."
"Lembas." Legolas asserted. "Or as close to it as any mortal has ever come."
"Better than those odd little..." he frowned, searching for adequate words, "...cakes like Dwarves with cream filing?" He tugged his beard thoughtfully, "Ah, the ones with the Khazad runes."
"Keebler. Yes. Better than those."
"What did you call them, these folk? Inedain?"
"Most called them Indians, which is an unfortunate mistake made by early explorers who thought they were in a different land. The lack of the presence of 'andabonath'...ah... oliphaunts... did not tip them off, so they gave these folk the name of the folk of the Land of Oliphaunts: India. Of course these folk already had names of their own; names that flowed from the tongue, names like Lakota or Dineh or Haudeenosaunee."
For once the Dwarf did not cut Legolas off in mid-stream of consciousness. It would be like trying to dam up a river. He plunged into his great bread-bowl of stew and watched the candlelight flicker across his friend's face, unchanged since he had stood beside him on the walls at Helm's Deep, an age ago.
Well, maybe not unchanged. There was something deeper in his eyes now. Sadder. Except when he was telling stories, then his eyes lit up like summer sun on a stream. Like now.
"Perhaps these folk had Elvish blood, Avari, maybe." Gimli suggested.
Legolas shrugged, "They were not of the Firstborn, but they were first in that land. Their distant ancestors made a great trek across a bridge of land much as..." he paused, and a mist seemed to come over his eyes.
Gimli leaned forward. "What?"
"It made me think of Galadriel's folk, crossing the grinding ice."
"Did they have a Dark Lord to fight?"
"No. Only the other Edain who came across the Great Sea from the east and changed everything."
To Gimli the mist seemed to darken. "I see it is a sad tale."
Legolas spoke as if from a distant place, "Long and dark, and full of sorrow. And forgotten things; languages and customs and wisdom. But a tale also of survival and small triumphs. Dana and Lizard told me some of it. But it is past."
"If I remember what you said before, it has not happened yet...?" Gimli looked confused.
Legolas refocused on his friend's face. "The Stream of Time..."
"Legolas..."
"Oh very well, forget the Stream of Time. I will tell the Story. These folk were unlike any of the Edain I had ever met. Except perhaps the Dunedain, though they did not look like them. Fair they were, and varied. Some short, some tall, stout as Dwarves or slender as Elves, with strong-boned faces and eyes like the shadows of the mountains. The ancient ones had hair as black as night, and skin the color of a summer deer, but their children's children were varied as the rainbow. There were some among them who remembered ancient wisdom, who understood things their own folk had forgotten, things the other Edain had never learned."
"As ever, Elves speak in riddles." Gimli said gently, half smiling.
"I guess you would call it magic."

Lizard
The Pilgrims never had it quite like this. Ok, maybe they had venison and turkey and cranberry sauce, yams and pumpkin pie and squash and corn, but they definitely did not have Ben and Jerry's Phish Food ice cream. Or Cherry Garcia. Or Dana's double death chocolate cheesecake. Legolas had three helpings. I was beginning to think he was part Hobbit. Drum Guy's girl sat across the table from us.
From Legolas.
Drum Guy turned out to be named Keith, the girl was Alicia. I saw her drag him outside for awhile, and when they came back in he had stopped glaring at Legolas. Mostly.
As if he really had anything to worry about. Man, if he only knew.
Dana chatted to the people next to us. Alicia struck up some polite conversation. Keith played the Clint Eastwood role; strong and silent and brooding. Legolas had another helping of Cherry Garcia. Lorien tried to explain why Cherry Garcia was a hysterically funny pun. Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, the band Legolas had liked so much from our CD collection.
Legolas got it.
I never saw an Elf snork ice cream through his nose before.
Lorien asked Alicia about life on the rez, back in South Dakota, where she was originally from. Alicia just smiled and nodded and answered with terminal patience. And kept watching Legolas. At first I thought it was the usual female reaction to the world's hottest male. Then I looked closer. It was more like...like...
...like the night I stayed up watching the bird feeder, waiting for the flying squirrels to come. And I wasn't sure they really existed.
Eventually we'd stuffed ourselves, and Drum Guy wandered off to set up with his friends for the after dinner song and dance. Alicia stayed. Lorien was chattering about how she camped in a tipi with friends a few years back. Dana moved off to talk to one of the people across the room. People began moving tables and chairs back out of the way, clearing the center of the room. The drum started up, a big wall-pounding heartbeat. Legolas turned and met Alicia's eyes. She studied him for a few long breaths.
"You're a long way from home, aren't you?" she said.
He froze, like a flying squirrel in a flashlight beam. In the middle of the room dancers began making a loose circle, the drum quickened.
Legolas tilted his head slightly, "I am."
She nodded. "Come on." she got up. "There's someone you should meet."

taphae-a tad: Legolas
"What?" Gimli said. "One who could recognize an Elf when they saw one?"
"So it seemed. Alicia led me to another table, Lizard and Lorien followed closely. There was a lady, as brown and withered as a winter leaf. She sat in a chair with great spidery wheels, and was flanked by two other women, younger, but perhaps grandmothers themselves."
"'Unci,' Alicia said to her, 'I've brought someone to see you.' Unci is grandmother in the tongue of the Dakota people. The Lady looked at me with eyes like the roots of mountains, like..." Legolas paused and considered his friend's dark eyes, and the depths behind them. And how briefly they burned with the fire of life.
"Yes?"
Like yours. But he did not say it. Legolas sighed. "Her eyes saw beyond the surface of things. She met my gaze as few of the Edain do, and smiled. I took her hand, cradling it in mine."
"'It is long since I have seen any of your kind.'" she said, her words as soft as owl down.
"'You... you have seen some of my folk?' I asked her in astonishment."
"We know of them.' She paused long, as if she had forgotten I was there. Then, 'Long ago, when I was thirteen, I went to see my aunt.' Her words came slow, but sure, like the tread of a turtle, 'She lived with a white man outside the reservation. It was long walk, and it was near Christmas. I was taking her a present I had made for her. On the way back it started to snow. I lost my way. A man appeared, on a horse. He was not dark, like my people. I thought he was one of the ranchers, maybe, but his horse wore no saddle, or bridle, and it was no stock horse, but a fine long-legged mare made all of wind and fire. She carried us both to my door, wrapped in his blanket. He did not speak, but he gave me a smile before he left. I remember his eyes. Like stars. Like yours."
"Cuil, haran inath in Edain..." Legolas said.
"A life, a hundred years of Men." Gimli said softly. "Too long. The Elves would have been gone."
"For my folk, but a ripple in the stream of time."
"There we go with that stream of time thing again."
Legolas straightened, gave Gimli a long patient look.
"Very well, what else did she tell you?" the Dwarf said.
"'Where was this place?' I asked her."
"'I think they are gone.' she said. 'The world has changed too much.' Then she read my heart, 'They say your folk see far.' she gave a sharp nod and squeezed my hand, 'Hmmph, like Hawk. Well, sometimes you need to see like Mouse!' "
"Mouse?" Gimli said.
"Mouse sees most with his whiskers." Legolas said. "Close, not far. Like a Dwarf in a mine tunnel."
"Hehnh." Gimli chuckled in agreement.
"She leaned close then and said one more thing..."

taphae-a-nel: Lizard
"...Raven." Unci said.
I felt a chill, like someone had left a door open. But a door to where?
As we made our way back to the dance circle Lorien, for once, was silent.
One of the women swept by and caught Legolas' arm, "Two-step, ladies choice." she said. They vanished into the stately swirl of color moving to the rhythm of the drum.
"Was that 'watch for Raven'...or' watch out for Raven'?" I said to Lorien.
Lorien frowned, but stayed silent.
I looked back toward the far end of the room, but Unci was gone.
I only had a few minutes to brood on it. Then the drum picked up the cheerful rhythm of a girl's jingledress song. This was not a powwow, so many dancers had not brought full formal regalia; bustles and roaches, feathers and fringe, just dance fans and shawls. A bunch of girls, the youngest about four, were hopping on light, quick toes. One had put on her jingledress, a colorful sheath of satin with rows of silver cones rolled from tobacco lids, they made a merry sleigh-bell beat as she hopped. Dana was in the middle, in a footwork duel with a ten year old. Someone caught my shoulders from behind and whispered in my ear, "Go on." Then gave me a light shove toward the circle. I half turned, Legolas gave me a big grin. I am gonna look sooooo stupid. But at least, not alone.
I grabbed Lorien and dragged her in with me.
She stumbled, bumbled, bit her lip in uncertainty.
Cool, I will not be the dumbest looking one out here. I'd done this before a few times, after hours at the powwows we'd gone to, not well, but, I'd done it. I felt the drumbeat, let it fall into my feet, and began to move.
Lorien was standing still, watching the feet of the fourteen year old in front of her.
Tippy toe-a tappa tappa bounce-a bounce-a bounce-a. Yeah, OK, I think I got this. I looked up at Legolas and he was watching the littlest kid with a sweet smile on his bowcurve mouth. I threw in a few spins and tried to figure out what it was that girl in front of me was doing. I looked over at Lorien, wondering if she had fallen over yet.
Those little Teva sandals were moving like gerbils on caffeine. Gallons of it. Precisely to the beat of the drum. Light and quick like the oldest girl's. I faltered, doing a great impression of a largemouth bass.
The littlest kid pattered around me and giggled.
"Ballroom dancing lessons. And tap. And..."
"Ok, ok, I get the picture."
"I never told you. I figured you'd think it was dumb." Lorien said.
Uh. Yeah. I thought of the look on our Elf's face. Maybe I should take up tango or something.
The drumbeat changed, the singers 'heya heya-ed' into a new song. Everybody danced, the girls spinning and hopping with quick little flashes of feet, older women bobbing in elegant dignity, their fringed dance shawls swaying like the grass of the plains, men stepping lightly to the rhythm of the drum, a few younger guys spinning, squatting and leaping like tornadoes in the fancy dance, one teen bending in the swaying rhythm of a grass dance, his feet drawing great arcs on the floor, pressing down imaginary prairie grass. Dana scorned the dignified bobbing of the other women her age and spun in a mad fancy dance with one of the girls, her shawl flying like butterfly wings. Legolas came and caught my arm and Lorien's and stepped lightly between us.
The drumbeat shifted, the song wailed into a new note. The sound was traditional, but the words, this time, were English; MickeyMouse MickeyMouse Donald Duck, they all live in Disneyland...all the kids danced gleefully into the circle.
Dance followed dance. The drum ran through it all like the heartbeat of the world. The singers' voices wove through it like wind, like wolfsong, like birds. We danced in the direction of the sun's path through the sky. Our feet touched Mother Earth like breathing, like that great drum heartbeat. The rest of the world and its problems fell away.
Legolas stood watching two young men, in full regalia, swirl in a fancy dance; their bustles soared off their shoulders and hips like the wings and tails of wild birds, their hands wove patterns in the air like hunting falcons. Legolas' eyes had a distant look, as if he wasn't seeing the dancers. Or as if he was seeing more than the dancers. I touched his arm, smooth and warm and hard-muscled as a horse's. I heard him catch his breath as if I had startled him.
"What do you see?" I asked him.
"Can you not feel it?" he said softly.
"What?"
"The..."
I could see him searching for the word. He shook his head, picked up my hand and held it cupped in his. He nodded back toward the dance circle. Then I saw.
Whoa! The floor swayed for a long slow heartbeat, then righted itself. I saw the dancers, the drum behind them, but around it all...no, through it..ran something like mist. No not mist, light. Light with weight and form like wind in living color. Like Dana's description of auras. Only more so. Much more. It soared up from the earth itself, whirled through the dancers joining the other light coming from the sky. It was every color, and some I had no names for.
"Whoa." I said out loud. The vision stretched for forever. For a single breath.
The dance ended, Legolas let go of my hand and the world faded back to grey. I caught his hand, "can you teach me to do that myself?" I said.
He gave me a long look, and his eyes were like the surface of the sea, hiding everything below. I thought of the feeling I'd just had, of the lightwind, of the colors that weren't in the rainbow. I reached for his hand and for the feeling of a moment ago and found it. His eyes glowed like the hearts of stars. A slow smile walked across his face. Perhaps, he said. It took me a minute to realize he hadn't said it out loud.
"Rabbit Dance!" the announcer called. "Everybody dance! Hoka!"
It was late, and the dancers who'd been in regalia had put it away. We had, between dances, helped the grandmothers clean up the kitchen. When I asked Dana if she'd learned anything, she just shook her head. I told her about Raven. She nodded. It made me think of Elrond, or Galadriel.
"Is that good or bad?" I asked. Raven, I meant.
"What do you think?" she said.
Go not to the Elves for council. I shrugged. "I think I'm gonna drop a mist net over that bloody bird if I see him again. Or get Legolas to shoot him down."
"That probably wouldn't be wise."
"Well, got any ideas on how we could trap him?"
"It's a federally protected bird. You can't. You should go dance, it's about the last one."
Couples were forming up and filing into the dance circle. Legolas was on the far side of the room, and Lorien was catching his arm and leading him into the circle. I let out a resigned sigh, it was one of the few dances where men and women danced together as a couple.
Rats. Big honkin' sewer rats. Big honkin' crawling through the culvert at Helm's Deep orcish sewer rats.
I felt a touch on my shoulder and turned to find a lean young guy with great cheekbones and dark brown hair and darker eyes, one of the earlier fancy dancers, in jeans and a t-shirt now.
"Hey," I said, the words kind of fell out of my mouth, "I saw you before, you were really good."
He smiled, kind of embarrassed like, "Yeah, so were you. Ummm, wanna dance?"
"Uh, yeah!" I caught his hand and we trotted out into the quick drumbeat, two steps forward and one step back, two steps forward and one step back.
"Now," the announcer called, "when I call red and white, switch to ballroom dancing!"
Two steps forward and one step back. Legolas and Lorien looked like they'd been doing this for five thousand years.
Two steps forward and one step back.
"Red and white!" called the announcer.
My fancy dancer caught my arm and swirled me into a scene straight out of an old black and white movie. I giggled, and spun and looked over at Lorien.
She was grinning, and spinning, and Legolas had lost the beat completely. He was laughing, and twirled a little faster than was humanly possible and came back to Lorien's hands.
"Rabbit dance!" the announcer called again.
Legolas and Lorien were in perfect sync again, and it didn't bug me at all.
Two steps forward and one step back. Yeah, just like life.
It was way better than Homecoming.

taphae-a-canad: Legolas
"Well", said Gimli, "At least you knew that there had once been Elves in that place. Perhaps there still were, somewhere."
"Dana thought so too. And she rolled the words of Unci around in her heart like a round pebble in the hand. Mouse. See like mouse. Perhaps an answer lay within reach of our whiskers."
"Raven, what about Raven?"
"Ravens have territories. Strong ties to a specific place. Lizard had seen the deep-silver one near the barn once. She did not know if the one she saw by her house was the same. Probably not. Too far away from Dana's barn. So I kept an eye out for his return to Dana's. A few of the small birds remembered seeing him that day, but not before, and not after."
"It seems your friends had forgotten any wisdom concerning ravens." Gimli said. "Balin often told us how old Carc and his wife used to live above the guard chamber at Ravenhill, and how their kin brought secret news to my kin. And how they were rewarded with such bright things as they coveted."
Legolas nodded, "I did not know old Carc or his kin, only the ravens who lived in the brighter parts of Mirkwood. They were wise and long-lived. Yet even the wise may be corrupted by power. I watched the trees and listened to the rumour of the small birds, and rode far into the great forest, but I did not see the great dark-silver bird Liz had seen, nor any of his kin, only crows."

Mushy Stuff
Life went on, two steps forward and one step back. Amanda was riding Beo through a first level test now. Lorien learned to do a flying lead change. Loda could go cross country for twenty miles and barely break a sweat. Legolas had learned the wisdom of the stirrup, and Loda's people were looking for a horse who actually wanted to be a genteel hunter, and new owners who wanted a horse who could run forever. Dana was torn between advertising him as an endurance riding horse, or sending him back to Middle-earth, just in case Gandalf needed a backup for Shadowfax.
And there were Unci's words about mouse. See like Mouse. Whatever that meant. Maybe it meant there were Elves in Yrch County. But where? Working at Booger King, McDeath Burger? Elvish lawyers? Used car salesmen? We visited three county parks, and tracked down half a dozen park rangers and one wildlife rehabber. We studied the faces of everyone we passed at the mall.
No Elves in sight. There was Thanksgiving vacation, in which I had too much pie and relatives and homework, and not enough Elf. It snowed, (which it never does in Yrch County, until the week of Farm Show in January). I thought of about fifty ways to trap a federally protected bird without the Game Commission knowing. All of them involved high-tech gear or magic I didn't possess. Dana, meanwhile, was on the net and on the phone, talking to friends and trying to figure out how to build a better Nazgul Barbie trap.
You could smell the brain cells frying fifty yards away.
We saw neither Nazgul Barbie, nor dark-silver ravens anywhere, just crows.
It was Sunday, and I had one more day to come up with a five page essay.
So of course I called Lorien and went to Dana's.
Strider rumbled in the lane over the new snow, bare trees were grey brushstrokes against blinding white, the hills of the gamelands behind the farm were silver tipped in black, like wolf fur.
"That," Lorien said, shoving Kodi off her lap for the forty-eighth time, "appears to be a...dogsled?"
She pointed to the object parked in Dana's driveway, a set of swoopy bowcurves of dark wood connected to four exuberant wolfish looking dogs, all singing at the top of their lungs.
"Yep."
"As in Call of the Wild, White Fang, Yukon gold rush." Lorien deadpanned. Her eyes were about the size of a startled owl's.
"More like Winterdance."
"What?"
"It appears there is much in great literature you have been sadly deprived of."
She gave me a glare.
"Gary Paulsen. Funniest sled dog book ever written."
"Better than Snow Dogs?"
"Ok, now who's the pop culture lemming," I grinned at her, "Snow Dogs was inspired by it. The book is way better."
Dana was crouching at the head of the team, holding the two leaders, another woman, clad in tan insulated coveralls was adjusting something on one of the wheel dogs. Legolas was standing on the runners, one foot on the brake, leaning on the driving bow. Dana's buffalo bow and quiver slung across his back.
"Cool! It's Maggie!" I parked and piled out, with a death grip on Kodi's lead. He grinned and lunged toward the team, singing in harmony with them.
Maggie looked up, "Hey Liz, want to run Couch Potato Boy there?"
"I think he can keep up with your mutts." I said amiably.
"The lighter sled's around on the other side of the van. Get it and you can take Bear, he goes well with Kodi. I'll put Shenzi in on wheel here." She nodded toward Legolas, "Your friend there followed me on the first run a couple of hours ago." She shook her head, grinning, "He's a natural. He has a way with the dogs."
"Like he can talk to them or something." I said. I thought of Arod, the horse of Rohan.
"Yeah." Maggie grinned. "Never saw anything like it." She winked at me, "Too bad he's too young for me."
Beside me Lorien coughed as if she'd just inhaled a pint of pepper.
"He's got good wood sense too. Like he was born there or something."
"Um, yeah, he was." About five hundred years ago. He should be good.
"Did a little stump shooting with that bow there. Didn't even slow the dogs down, just balanced on the runners!" Maggie looked as if she'd just found a whole team of Iditarod dogs at the SPCA. "Damn! Where'd you find him?"
"Ahhhh..."
"What about me?" Lorien broke in, poking me in the arm. "I can ride with you guys, right?"
"Too much for a two-dog team. And the little sled steers weird with somebody in the basket." I said.
"Ride with with Legs over there, that's the freight sled." Maggie said. "And it'll slow down my guys enough for Kodi to keep up." she winked again.
"Yeah, you just wait." I said. "We'll show you how it's really done."
I chained Kodi to the dogline anchored from Maggie's van's bumper to a big stake in the ground. I dug around in her gear box and found a harness in Kodi's size, slid it over his head, pulled his front feet through. Laid out the sled and the two-dog line. Legolas came over with one hand through the collar of a big black and tan dog. Bear was hopping enthusiastically on his hind legs, hauling with every ounce of his ninety or so pounds, Legolas held him easily as if he was a puppy. Bear was about thirty pounds bigger than even a big Siberian, so Maggie figured he was probably part Malamute. He wasn't as fast as some of her other dogs, but he made up for it in raw power.
We hooked Bear and Kodi in beside each other, and I took the neckline connecting their collars, leading them to a spot behind the other team. Lorien climbed in the other sled's basket, clinging to the side rails. I noticed she'd scrounged a riding helmet from Dana. Legolas stepped onto the runners behind her, hands on the driving bow, framing her shoulders. It looked almost cozy.
Sometimes I wish I was more of a dork.
Maggie was holding the lead dogs on Legolas' team. He made a sharp hand sign at her, waving her away. She stepped back, and the dogs did something totally amazing.
They stood perfectly still. Oh, they were still singing and shouting at the top of their lungs, but they were holding their position, not blasting down the trail.
Maggie walked by me, "Ok? Ready?" she said.
I nodded.
Maggie looked back at Legolas, shook her head in amazement. "He's something." she paused, a faraway look in her eyes, "You know," she said, "all the best ones are married, dead, gay or fictional."
"Yeah," I said, "He's fictional."
Maggie laughed.

These were the trails I knew with my eyes closed. I could picture every twist and turn of a horse, every shift of pace needed to navigate them. This was different. No thunder of hoofs, no rise and fall of horse's back like sea-swells, only the smooth swoosh of runners over snow, the soft chuff of dogbreath, the faint jingle of dog-tags and snaps and carabiners. Dogs run better in the cold, and the few inches of fresh snow was perfect, and fast. Around us the woods were silent, except for the occasional trill of a winter bird.
I knew the dogs would run hard for the first mile or so, and here the trail ran along the field edges, and along a State Forest service road, wide enough for a Jeep or two teams abreast. I grinned into the wind and called over to Legolas, "Last one to the creek is a poodle driver!" I yelled to Kodi and Bear and squinted through the bits of ice and snow kicking into my face. Kodi and Bear were already flying, flattening out into a hard run, tails level, backs flexing like a longbow being rapid-fired. Legolas crouched on the runners and called to the four dogs before him. They flattened out, legs flying in unison like a well-tuned machine. They drew level with me, then inched past. Shenzi looked over and leered at me.
"Hahhahhah!" I shouted at her. "Catch me." Couch Potato Boy wasn't doing so bad, neither was Bear, but Maggie's other three, and Shenzi were fast, even with Lorien weighing down the big freight sled a bit. They crept ahead, and passed, and I could see Legolas balancing on the runners, as easily as he had on the snowboard, his lean leggy body making those delicious otter curves through the turns, one foot, then the other shooting out and peddaling as if he'd been doing it for centuries.
I tried to remember if it ever snowed in Mirkwood.
The trail left the field edges and dived into the forest. Twisting madly through the trees, but still wide enough to pass, if I could catch up, they were a few lengths ahead now, and still running hard. I heard Lorien shout a few times, probably in stark panic. Then the trail rose a little, as it climbed a slight rise.
Legolas' team slowed, almost imperceptibly. I called to Bear, not the fastest sled dog ever, but Maggie had told tales of his endurance and sheer dogged persistence. "Hike! Bear! Let's go! Hike, hike!" I could see him lean into the harness harder, drop a few inches closer to the ground, Kodi's tug slackened a moment, then he threw himself back into it as Bear pulled ahead. We inched ahead, Kodi's head even with Legolas, then with Lorien, then I was staring at Shenzi in wheel position. "Hah hah!" I laughed at her. She flattened and pulled, wrinkling the line ahead of her, almost running over the lead dog. Legolas was running between the runners now, shoving the sled to help.
The dogs were still running flat out...nobody could run that fast.
He was.
I pedaled madly and Bear and Kodi inched farther ahead, then the trail swooped up to the top of the rise and Bear's great strength proved itself, as Legolas' team slowed for the hill. We swept by and I grinned back at him. His face was colored by wind and running and he was laughing.
Then down through the woods, the road straight and fast here, but it was only a short run to the bridge, Legolas' team didn't have time to catch us.
I slowed at the bridge and we came abreast.
"I think," Legolas called to me, "that my poodles need a rest, and my passenger needs to loosen her grip before her hands freeze that way forever."
"Up there." I pointed to the next rise. We slowed to a steady trot, and climbed the hill.
He called "whoa!" and the dogs stopped and stood. He set the snow hook, and reached down and pried Lorien loose from the sled's rails, then half lifted her out of the basket.
Lorien crunched through the snow to the edge of the hill and stared down across the vast forest to the west. She looked like Legolas seeing Fangorn for the first time. I realized she'd never been out this far into the forest before. She dug in her pocket for her camera, and began shooting.
"This must be what Mirkwood is like!" She exclaimed.
Legolas rested a bare hand on her shoulder, "No, and yes. This is a great wood, full of life, and the land rolls to the horizon in much the same way." His hand swept across the horizon in a graceful gesture. "Yet in Mirkwood, the trees are greater, older. This place is young, the trees are far younger than it is, and brighter than Mirkwood. There is no trace of that Shadow here."
"Yeah, just some pollution and habitat loss." I said. "That's why it feels so young. All the old trees were cut long ago."
"Still, they replanted some, and this is a State Forest now." Lorien said, "It's better than it was fifty years ago. And they've reintroduced some vanished native species, like otters and fishers."
"Fishers?" Legolas said.
"Kind of like a smaller, quicker wolverine." I said.
"Like a mink crossed with a grizzly bear." Lorien said.
"They climb trees and eat porcupines for a living." I added.
His eyes widened in wonder, "A formidable creature, no doubt. Where can we find one?" He looked ready to mount an expedition right at that moment.
"Not here, farther north." I said.
"Oh." he looked disappointed. Then he brightened, "Perhaps we could journey there. Before I return home."
"Maybe." I said. Yeah, that would be something, traveling for awhile in the woods with Legolas. I could learn the speech of birds, hear what the trees were whispering, learn what the rocks remembered. See the secret life of the forest nobody ever saw. I kind of hoped it'd be awhile before we figured out how to send him back.
We set off down the hill, Legolas in the lead. We kept both feet planted on the piece of snowmobile track sliding between the runners. It made a kind of light brake, going down a steep trail like this one.
I heard Legolas call to the dogs now and again, in Sindarin, then one English command to go left; haw! The dogs had slowed to a ground-eating trot, tongues hanging, mouths wide in great joyous grins. The sun was high and bright, but the air had a knife-edge to it. The trail widened and I yelled "trail!" and urged Bear and Kodi on by Legolas' team. Shenzi grinned at me as I whooshed by and leaned into her harness a little harder. I heard Legolas call something to her, in Sindarin. Kodi and Bear swept by. I glanced back and Shenzi had a look on her face as if she had leapt at a bird and missed.
There were some trails here I rarely took on horseback, because the trees overhung them too low. I took them now, geeing down one turnoff, then hawing down another. Down into a shallow valley and up the next hill, walking between the runners to rest the dogs. Then down again, in that ground-eating trot.
"Gee!" I shouted as Kodi and Bear came up to a turnoff, Kodi lifted his head and hauled right, Bear grinned and followed. I tucked and leaned on the runners, warping them through the sharp turn. Behind me Lorien gave a shout, this time it was gleeful. Then there was only the soft shush of runners and the breathing of the dogs.
And somewhere at the edge of hearing, a low growl.
"What is that?" Legolas said. I looked back and he was pointing toward the sound I was hoping was my imagination. It wasn't.
"Snowmobiles." I grumbled. The worst thing a dogteam could meet on a trail, short of an enraged moose, and around here, the only places you saw moose were zoos. "Damn!"
"It's pretty far away." Lorien said, "Maybe they're not coming this way."
It got louder.
Double damn. They had a tendency to come screaming around corners without looking. We could pull the dogs off into the woods, and wait for them to go by.
A turnoff was coming up, and I recognized it. I'd taken Cherokee over it a few times in the fall. There were a couple of downed trees that made nice little trail jumps. Something a dogteam could go over, but a snowmobile couldn't. "Haw!" I yelled and Bear pulled left, down the trail. We wound through the tight trees and the first log came up, barely a bump in the new snow, the dogs poured over it and I hopped the sled like a snowboard on a mogul. Behind me Lorien squawked, and I heard a gleeful laugh, not hers. The trail wound through some fairly sharp turns and then a somewhat bigger mogul. "Ho, hooooa, ho!" I called, slowing the dogs to a walk, they climbed it and I shoved the sled over. I looked over my shoulder and Legolas was doing the same.
On the trail we'd just left the roar of an engine grew louder, then wound down to a softer purr, then roared again.
I looked back and shouted to Legolas, "Idiots! They're taking our trail!" I called to the dogs, "Hike! Let's go!" and they took off with a new burst of speed.
We were a few hundred yards down the trail when I heard the engine sputter into silence. I thought I heard a shout too. It didn't sound pleased.
Serves them right I muttered to myself.
The dogs fell into a steady trot, and I made a turn that headed back to Dana's.
Kodi's clockwork gait faltered and he looked up.
"On by!" I yelled.
A broad set of wings sailed overhead and headed down the trail in the direction of the snowmobile.
"Whoa!" I stood on the brake, but Kodi was already stopped. "Legolas!"
He stood on his runners, drawn bow following the flight of those wings.
Silver wings. Raven wings. Shoot it! I wanted to yell, but the words froze.
The bow wavered, lowered, arrow unreleased. Raven vanished.
"Legolas!" Whatthehell were you thinking? Why didn't you...
He sheathed the arrow and slung the bow on his back again, as quick as a falcon folds its wings. The trail behind us was silent. He looked at me, "Your raven." It wasn't really a question.
"Yeah!" Of course it was! The one we need to knock out of the sky!
His eyebrows folded in concentration, "Something strange about it..."
"What?" Yeah, it's in league with Nazgul Barbie and her Minions of Doom. Or maybe she's a shapeshifter, like Mystique, and the raven IS her. Why the hell didn't you do something?
"Wrong color. And I do not know that it is in league with Nazgul Barbie."
He had heard what I hadn't said. I stared at him for a startled moment, then realized what he'd said about color. "They're not always black."
"No, the dance, remember? The...light. Different."
"Well, what does it mean?"
"I don't know. I didn't see enough."
"Raven and wolf." came a soft voice from the sled.
"What?" I turned and stared at Lorien.
"Odin has two wolves as well as his ravens; Raven and Wolf."
"Not the one-eyed dude again."
"Some of the Native American tribes identified with Wolf; teacher, healer, family provider. And Raven was Wolf's eyes, and the eyes of the Native hunter. Raven was wise and would lead the hunters, four legged or two, to game."
"So? Buncha' fairy tales."
"Oh?" Her eyes went meaningfully to the Elf, then to me. "Anyway, it's not just fairy tales, it's biology. Wolves follow ravens to prey, ravens share in the kills. They're connected. I read it in Mind of the Raven."
"What has that got to do with us? And our Nazgul-spy?"
Lorien gestured at the grey-furred, pointy-eared dog teams. "Wolves. Maybe he's not on her side."
I shook my head. I wasn't so sure. Not at all.

There was one place I knew you could rent snowmobiles. We went there, the three of us, Monday. Sure enough, there was one with a freshly busted ski still on the trailer in front of the shop. And sure enough, nobody could remember who had rented it.

taphae-ar-leben: Legolas
"Well, what was it you saw?" Gimli said, "Just a raven, the silver one Lizard had seen. An unusual color perhaps, but nothing worthy of note."
"Ravens did not live in that wood. And this one was..."
To the eyes of Gimli, Legolas seemed to be looking inward, searching for something. Finally he looked up and met his friend's gaze. "It was different. I only had a glimpse."
"What of Lorien, and the strange picture...box...thing..."
"Camera. She did not catch the raven with it. And the camera shows only the surface of things. To the camera, and your eyes it would have been just a raven. A different color, but a raven. But I saw..." his hands made shapes in the air before him, "...the light that flows through all beings...it was strong in this one, with other...colors. Not like any raven I knew. And the dogs...they saw it first, and were not afraid."

Lizard
"That's how she knows where we are." I was sure of it, and sure that Legolas could knock it out of the sky when we saw it again. I didn't care if it was a federally protected species, this one had lost all its rights when it hooked up with Nazgul Barbie. "Crebain, from Dunland." I muttered. I turned to Legolas, "There's gotta be some way you can shoot it down without quite killing it. Throw a net on it or something. Trap it maybe. With roadkill or shiny things. Donuts. Something. Then maybe we could follow the trail back to her." I slid the last stall door open and dumped a scoop of grain in the bin.
"Graban." Legolas said softly, "Not craban. Crebain often were corrupted by the Dark Powers, used as spies. Though the ones around here are not evil. Grebain, ravens, are wiser, harder to corrupt. I am not convinced this one is evil."
"You don't know for sure."
"No. I didn't get a long look at it."
"I think we should go on a raven hunt anyway." I said.
He looked at me, his eyes as readable as a night sea. "I'll keep watch for it." was all he said.
Over the next two weeks, Lorien and I thought of dozens of ways to trap a raven. Legolas grudgingly agreed to try a few of them. Problem was, they all required the presence of a raven.

A Shortcut to McDonalds
"What does that say?"
"Fred's Used Cars."
"And that one?"
"Bargain Lot; Used Cars."
"There, there!"
"More used cars."
"Your folk have more cars than Mirkwood has trees."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
Legolas was leaning out Strider's passenger side window like a Labrador retriever, snowboard hat tails waving in the wind, learning the fine art of English Literacy. Lorien huddled next to him, a little closer than I thought was necessary despite the mid-December air coming through the window. The cold didn't bother him any.
"That is why the air smells..." he wrinkled his long hawk-beak nose in distaste, "strange." he said with some diplomacy. "Not like the forest."
Kodi sang in agreement through the open window between the cab and the cap-covered truckbed.
"If they made the roads just a little wider," Lorien said, "and put a bike lane on each one, people would ride more places, use less gas."
"Solve the oil crisis, end pollution and war in the middle east." I finished. "Around here they'd just drive their SUVs on the bike path to avoid the traffic jams."
We crawled, one vertebrae in a huge car-snake, past car lots and convenience stores, fast food and other franchises, banks and beauty salons, while Lorien continued to read the History of Yrch County from the roadside signs. Legolas leaned out the window, wide-eyed, exclaiming about traffic lights, neon signs, giant inflatable Santas, and wondering what strange magic had created so much asphalt. Lorien had to pull him back into the cab a few times when people gave us odd looks. More than once, drivers gave us a glance, then a second look. A long longing one. Women drivers, naturally, well, mostly. A few of them turned and followed us.
Elf gravity.
We were on a Mission. We had a week till Christmas and almost no shopping done. We were armed for bargains. Even Legolas had a nice pile of cash in his pocket, from some things he had done for Dana around the farm. First, though, we needed to fuel up. We pulled into McDonald's.
"Couldn't we get real food?" Lorien said.
"They have salad."
"Not real salad."
Legolas stood staring at the lit-up menu boards. "What," he said, "is an egg-muck-muffin?"
"It's evil." Lorien said, "It will corrupt you." She ordered her not-real salad, and made them give her a large cup for water instead of the usual tiny one.
I got a burger with everything. And one for the Elf. And giant fries. I offered a fry to Lorien.
She made a sign in the air as if warding off Great Evil. I gave the rest to Legolas.
He ate all of them.
"Are you really sure," I asked Lorien, "he's not part Hobbit?"
We made our way back out through the little knot of women who had collected on our end of Mickey D's, and crossed the parking lot to the truck. Kodi arooed at us from the cap-covered truck bed. I opened the back gate and handed him half a burger. Behind me Lorien suddenly said, far louder than necessary, "Whoa! Did we ever play that Enya CD for you? Come on, let me show you."
I turned to see her pulling Legolas back into the truck's front seat.
Huh? Then I heard the CD player blasting. Dad had wired it so you didn't have to have the ignition on. A shadow sailed across my feet, I looked up.
A dozen seagulls were circling the dumpster. One landed a few feet from me and cocked his head at me, then waddled toward me, hoping I still had some fries left. "Shoo!" I hissed, and waved uselessly at him. I dived into Strider's front seat and fired him up. I may have laid some rubber and cut off one soccer mom in a minivan.
Legolas reached behind Lorien and touched my shoulder, "What's up?"
"Um, nothing important. I just realized what time it was and we want to get to the mall before the big crowds, and I think Wal-Mart is having some kind of sale that ends at noon."
"Uh huh." he said. He didn't believe a word of it. "Did it have something to do with those birds in the parking lot?"
Lorien and I exchanged glances full of subdued panic.
"What were they? I have never seen them before." he said, turning in the seat and peering back out of the window.
"Pigeons." I said. "Really big ones."

Santa's Little Helpers
Legolas stood entranced, staring in wonder at the acres of glass that was the entrance of Wal-Mart.
"He saw them." I hissed to Lorien. "Now what?" The gulls I meant.
"In The Book he only heard them in the dark. He never saw them till later. It was their song that turned on the sea-longing."
"Maaaaaaan, I just hope The Book is right."
So far, it seemed to be. We stopped at the Salvation Army guy, dinging his bell in front of the doors and gave him our change. Legolas popped a five in the pot and seemed mildly surprised when the fat little guy in the green elf hat gave him a particularly exuberant blessing.
We walked past the bespectacled grandmother cheerfully greeting customers, she nodded and smiled at us, and smiled a little broader at the Elf. She had a little elf hat on too.
Legolas stood in the main aisle looking up and down the cavernous expanse of stuff. "Elo!" he whispered.
I remembered something in The Hobbit about King Thranduil having a pretty good stash, though not as awesome as the Elvenkings of old. "Kinda like Mirkwood's hidden treasure room, eh?" I said.
He turned and gave me a look of surprise. "What do you mean?"
"You know, somewhere in the dungeons, a room piled high with gold and jewels and stuff."
His face crinkled into a gentle laugh, "You mean like a dragon's hoard? Tales grow down through the ages. There is no such place in my father's halls. The things we find beautiful are distributed throughout the halls, and the houses beyond." He gave the long stretches of shelving and the people, like manic ants on the move, another long look. What he thought of it he didn't say.

taphae-ar-leneg: Legolas
"What do you mean there's no treasure room in Mirkwood?"
"There isn't. There never was."
Gimli stared openmouthed at his friend of many years, many miles, many adventures. "Ridiculous! All kings have hoards, somewhere." He leaned forward, a glint in his eye, "Of course it matters no longer, so you can tell me. Really."
Legolas laughed. "Really. Our wealth was in the forest itself."
Gimli sat back on his hammock, swaying gently with the roll of the ship. He plumped up a few pillows, shook out his blankets. "Well, these Edain certainly had a treasure room. A whole city of treasure. "What did they call it again?"
"The Mall."
"Where did it all come from?"
"All over the great round world. There was much trade between lands, and the Mall was like an unimaginably huge market." He swung his long legs up onto his own hammock and perched there, cross-legged, hands flying like birds as he described the wonders of Wal-Mart. "Glass, Gimli! Yards of it, panes of it as broad as ships' sails, and as smooth as polished mithril."
"It had no leading?" Gimli's hands described the leading that joined the small panes of rippley glass he was used to seeing. "None?"
Legolas nodded excitedly.
"Preposterous! How would you make such a large piece of glass? What would hold it together? Magic?"
"No." Legolas frowned, "Well, I think not, anyway. The ceiling was as high as the Great Room in my father's halls, and piled with goods! With pots and dishes and things of the kitchen. With furniture and pillows and linens in more colors than a field of butterflies. And Gimli! A wall of TVs, with the same picture dancing across each, till one's eyes went in dizzy circles. A hall of shelves as high as a man could reach, full of rainbow bottles of things for body and hair. And another wall of shelves full of preparations for changing the color of your hair! And Gimli, tools! Enough tools to arm a family of Dwarves! Wonderful things such as you could not even imagine! For sawing and cutting and drilling and shaping, and..." he shook his head, "I had no idea what many of them would do, but there were folk in that department who looked like your folk."
"Mine?"
"Yes! Stout and bearded. Only taller. And toys! Whole shops full of toys! Furry things like wild creatures, dolls and soldiers and puzzles and games. And strange things that I could not fathom the purpose of. "
Gimli's bright eyes were nearly hidden by bushy, disbelieving brows. Some tales, he was sure, grew in the telling.

Lizard
We wandered down the mall, collecting more and more bags of stuff, and a little straggle of female shoppers drifting in our wake.
Elf gravity.
Legolas stopped to peer in shop windows; to rush in and stare in wonder at endless shelves of books, at coffee makers, at a fortress of towels in Martha Stewart colors, at a wall of TVs. He put headphones on at the music store and jumped like a panicked moose when the kid behind the counter cranked up some heavy metal.
"Uh, maybe you wanna try some New Age...over there." the kid said uncertainly.
He stood in the center of the Herb and Bath shop, with his eyes closed, just breathing. Lorien kept running over and sticking different smelly things under his nose. After a half hour of The Zen of Scent, and the girl behind the counter giving us strange looks, I hurriedly bought a big pink bottle of some kind of mystery goo that smelled like raspberries for Mom, and dragged both of them out of there.
At Jungle Bob's Tropical Pet Shop and Fish Emporium, Legolas collected a little crowd of admiring kids when every parrot in the place decided to sit on him. They were even more impressed when he got the four foot iguana to sit on his head like a hat. The only thing he wouldn't touch were the tarantulas.
At the toy store we staged our own episode of Animal Planet until the grandma behind the counter made us put the stuffed toys back. Legolas went back in the store and came out with two suspiciously large bags, which he would not let us see the contents of. I glanced at Grandma; she was waving at our Elf from the front of the store with a big smile on her face.
At the Cosmic Comic Cupboard all three of us rummaged through endless boxes of back issues. While Legolas vanished to the far end of the store to check out the latest X-Men offerings, Lorien and I continued our dive into the past.
Lorien surfaced with a huge grin and a "Whoa! Hey, look at this!" She frantically waved an old issue whose cover featured a blue Elf in pirate gear cavorting with a cutlass on the deck of a tall ship.
I grabbed it out of her hot little hands. "Nightcrawler! The Dave Cockrum four-part mini-series! Awesome! Got it already."
"I know, dodo brains." She nodded in the direction of our Elf, still glomming through new issues in the back. "He doesn't."
I stared at her, disbelieving. "You're actually going to send comic books back to Middle-earth?"
She shrugged. "He's gotta have something to do on that long sea voyage."
Somewhere in the middle of the mall we passed one of those kitschy Christmas displays, with the half acre of polyfill snow, the giant storybook, a polar bear and some penguins (never mind the fact they come from opposite poles), an animated reindeer nodding its antlers in endless boredom, the throne for Santa, and a bunch of short animated elfin things in pointy hats and curly shoes. A line of kids was making their way up to the fat guy in the red suit.
"Ho ho ho!" he chortled to a slightly terrified five year old.
"Waaaaaaugh!" wailed the girl. Her mom caught her purple mittened hand and retreated.
Legolas stopped and leaned on the railing, studying this strange cultural phenomenon. He was silent for awhile, watching Santa. Then he pointed to one of the animated pointy-hat guys. "Are those Hobbits?"
"Um, well..." Lorien said.
"I have heard of them of course, but I have never met them. Odd garb...those shoes would not do well in farming, and I thought they always went barefoot."
"Ahhh, actually..." I said.
"Oooooh, Daddy, look at the cute little elves!" came a small girl voice nearby.
Ack. Lorien and I cringed in unison.
Legolas turned to me, one eyebrow raised in a questionmark.
"Uh, well, some tales shrink down through the ages." I said.
Lorien looked up into his sea-grey eyes; eyes that would see the balrog, count the overwhelming enemy at Helm's Deep, that would meet the deep, wise eyes of Treebeard himself. "The story you are part of changed all that." She eyed the tiny toymakers, "Well, some of it, anyway. Some of us have remembered who the Elves really were."
"Ah." He gave her a gentle smile, like the one he gave Frodo at the end of RotK. When he was blond, and Orlando Bloom. He stayed, leaning on the railing, watching the various reactions of the children to Santa, like a bemused Elf at a Hobbit birthday party. "What's a Power Ranger?" he asked suddenly.
I had sudden visions of what Strider could have done with giant robots in Middle-earth.
"Why?" Lorien asked.
"That little girl asked for one."
"You can hear what they're saying?"
"Yes. Why are they telling him what they want?"
I turned to Lorien, "Didn't you tell him?"
"No, I thought you did."
"Tell me what?"
"About Christmas."
"Dana told me some. It resembles our mid-winter Yule celebrations. But I do not understand the importance of the Red Wizard."
"Uh, he lives at the North Pole with a bunch of Elves who make toys for him, and on Christmas Eve, he fires up his nine reindeer sleigh, loads it with toys and flies all over the world delivering them." I said. "Oh yeah, the lead reindeer has a light-up nose and in at least one story, hangs out with an Elf named Herbie who wants to be a dentist."
"Hermie." Lorien intoned.
"Whatever."
Legolas gave us both an odd look. "Why would they choose to live north of the Grinding Ice?"
"Yes, that is very odd." Lorien said, "It's just a frozen-over ocean. Submarines can surface through it."
"No Elf would live there, Dwarves perhaps. They like crafting such things as you have here." he gestured toward the expanse of the mall. "And why would he use reindeer? And what craft would make them fly? Why not just use one of your airplanes instead?"
"Yeah." I agreed. "Or Fed Ex."
"It's just a legend." Lorien said. "A fairy tale."
And we are standing next to what? I looked up at Legolas, and looked at the stand-in Santa in the middle of the poly-fil North Pole, and wondered what other legends had shrunk down through the ages. And where they were living now.
Mouse. Unci had said. See like mouse.
Legolas turned then, as if someone had spoken to him, and the purple mittened five year old stared up at him. Her mom stood a few feet away, chattering to a friend, oblivious. The girl, who five minutes ago had screamed at Santa, stared up at this black-braided stranger, in hiking boots and jeans and an outrageous snowboard hat and broke into a huge smile. I could see their eyes meeting, and I thought I could...no, I knew I could see something in the kid's eyes.
She knew.
Legolas smiled back, a gentle, sweet smile. With a wink, as if a secret had passed between them.

taphae-ar-odog: Legolas
"Santa? Blue wizards, brown wizards, grey wizards, white...I never heard of a red wizard."
"Nor I. But this Saint Nicholas the Red seemed to be the center of the Yule season celebrations. There were others; Christ-mass and Hanukka and Kwanzza and Sol-stice, each culture had its own, but all of them seemed to love the Red Wizard."
"What about the Hobbits? Why were there Hobbits?"
Legolas flinched, "Ehhh, it was such memory as most of their folk preserved of..."
"Yes?"
"...us."
Gimli laughed. Then, seeing the look on his friend's face, harumphed and pulled his blankets up a bit father. "Well, if that's all they remembered of the Eldar, perhaps I don't want to know what they remembered of my folk."
Legolas nodded. He would spare Gimli the tale of Dopey and Doc.

Lizard
We finally sat in the food court eating soft pretzels, and collecting stares from passing women. A lot of them went from the pace of manic squirrels to that of a snail on a Sunday drive as they passed. A few stopped in little clusters of conversation, shooting glances our way without looking like they were looking.
Elf gravity.
Finally, Lorien rose, "We're going to Gander Mountain." she announced. "Without you."
"Oh." The outdoor store. I could think of fifteen things I wanted there, that both of them knew about.
"Cool."
She shared a conspiratory look with Legolas.
"Ok. I got other stuff to get down the mall. Meet you in..." I looked at my watch, "...an hour? Here?"
"Yeah. Good. We'll take our first haul back to Strider."
"Stuff the bags in the big dog crate in the back or Kodi will eat them."
"He can guard them then."
"Hah hah hah, A Siberian watch dog. If somebody really tried to take all that stuff he'd just watch them take it." I handed over my bags and headed back down the mall to The Bookstore.

taphae-a-tolodh: Legolas
When we had as much baggage as Bilbo had returning from the incident with the dragon, Lorien and I stowed the bags in the truck. It was good to be out in the clear air again. The Mall was full of voices ricocheting off bare walls, and footfalls and hurry and annoyance, and music that made one's head ache after awhile. We had to walk a long way to the edge of the parking lot; a field of cars that stretched like a besieging army around the great Mall. I took Kodi for a walk, and he was glad to be out of the den in the back of the truck. We went along the edge of one of the small islands of soil and trees scattered throughout the bare rock of the parking lot. I bade Kodi wait, gave his lead to Lorien, and climbed up, even though the tree was small and young. I could see the leagues of land stretched out before me; the Mall and its circling army of cars, the roads beyond with their streaming traffic, the crowded patterns of the houses and places where the folk conducted their daily business, and the grey rolling hills beyond. Far off there were patches of farmland, and near was the great sprawl of the city. Not bright, like Minas Tirith; grey and brown and full of movement, but little life. The far grey hills were cleaner, but there was no wilderness to be seen, except to the north, whence we came. Lorien stood beneath the tree and asked what I saw. I told her.
"No," she said, "I mean the other stuff, the light, the energy, like at the dance, like what Liz saw."
"In places it is strong yet. Where there are trees and living things."
"And where there aren't? Like in the city?"
"Ah," I could not find words to describe it.
"There is too little that grows here and is glad." Lorien said.
"Where did you hear that?" I asked.
She smiled, almost sadly, "You said it once. In the story."
"Ah."
"And then you brought a bunch of birds that sing and trees that do not die to Minas Tirith. Well, maybe I shouldn't have told you that. Maybe it will change things. If we ever get you back."
A shadow fell on her face then, and it went to my heart.
"Up with your head, fair maiden of the Edain, the end of the tale is not yet written, and hopelessness is only for those who have already read the end."

Lizard
I wandered down the mall in a kind of hazy Christmas daze, thinking which of The Books on Lorien's List of Doom I could afford, and what to get Legolas. What do you get a guy who's just going to go back to Mirkwood any day now? Not a CD player, that's for sure. I stopped in front of the shop windows, not really looking at anything. I got to The Bookstore and found one really good book on the Lorien list.
Somewhere at the bottom of the video screen in my brain, the little warning light started flashing again. The little leather pouch Dana had given me felt suddenly warm against my chest. Right at the edge of my field of vision, something moved, lithe and light, with delicious otter curves.
Like Legolas.
I turned and there was a middle aged computer geek type in the aisle next to me, looking over the science fiction rack. A kid farther down checking out a fantasy novel with a muscular Elf and a Dwarf wielding an oversized axe on the cover. There was a lady in the romance section, a big plaid guy with a beard in Home Improvements. I walked around the end of the rack.
A thirty-something guy in a grey bomber jacket was kneeling on the floor, studying the titles at the other end of the SF shelf. Half his hair was pulled back into a neat braid, like Legolas in the movie. The rest fell around his shoulders like a horse's mane. He pulled out a book. He stood up, still reading. No. He didn't stand, he flowed up, like a leopard yawning. He must have felt my eyes boring a hole in him because right then he turned and looked at me.
I looked into eyes like the sky over the Himalayas. Like the space between the stars.
Like Legolas'.
Something in his face shifted, startled, then shifted back again, as composed as a cat by a fire. "Looking for something special?" he said. He cocked his head a little. It made me think of birds.
"Ah. Yeah. Er..." My mouth had totally lost all connection with my brain. It occurred to me about then that his hair wasn't that dead grass blond I'd thought it was. It was bluer. Not grey, not black and white hairs. Each individual hair deep blue-grey, like his jacket, like a blue cat. Like a grulla horse.
Like our raven.
He shifted his shoulders, his eyebrows dropped like birdwings, he looked like he was going to say...
Someone moved around the rack behind him; tall, pale-haired.
With a face that could have belonged to Galadriel's brother.
"Hey," Galadriel's brother said very softly.
Sky-eyes turned, I followed his gaze and met eyes the color of the sea, and deeper. "Tulugaq!" the pale-haired one said, low, but sharp, like a command. "Let's go." He fixed his eyes on mine, and then I was falling to the bottom of the sea.
I blinked, breathed again. Ran around the end of the book rack, but they were gone.
I ran out into the mall, looking up and down the crowded length of it.
They were gone.
taphae-a-neder: Legolas
"I began to climb down then," Legolas continued, "for I could see Lorien was getting chilled.
Something caught my eye, then, a flash of wings, silver against blue."
"The gulls the girls were trying to not have you see?" Gimli broke in.
"No. Broad wings, painted on the side of one of the cars. A familiar shape. I climbed down and called to Lorien to follow. Kodi plunged after me, dragging Lorien with him. They caught up to me a few minutes later, by a Jeep the color of sky over the high mountains."
"Jeeeep? Is this a letter of the alphabet I am unaware of?"
"No. It is the name of a car Dwarves would love. It is small and hardy and tough, and can go almost anywhere a pack mule can. This one had a bright design on the doors; a pale sun, or perhaps a full moon, with a dark silver bird, wings spread in flight across it. Broad wings with a wedge-shaped tail, and a great beak like a broadsword."
"A raven!"
"Yes! Lorien came panting up beside me and stared at it in astonishment. Kodi stood up with his paws on the door, a great happy grin on his face. Lorien pulled him back, as if she thought the Jeep might be dangerous."
"It does not feel evil." I told her. "What does this say?" I pointed to the runes scrawled across the bottom of the door.
"Ravin' Maniac. It's a pun. Raving, as in mad, wild, or slightly crazy. Fey, maybe. Raven, as in bird." she frowned, walked around the Jeep, "There's a bumper sticker that says I'd rather be flying, and a little sticker here for a pilot's association. And one that says my other ride is blue too... with a picture of the tardis." Then her face brightened, "This says Hawk Circle Farm." Her grin widened, "There's an address." She looked up at me, "You don't think..."
''That this could have some connection to our raven?" I walked around the Jeep, a feather dangled from the rearview mirror.
It was dark silver.

Lizard
Legolas and Lorien met me halfway down the mall, he had seen me coming. We came together in a knot of excitement, all babbling at once.
"Elves," I said, "there were Elves in the mall."
They both shut up and stared at me.
Legolas caught my shoulders and fixed me with a look that could have pierced the dark at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. "What?" his eyes shone bright but his voice was barely a wind whisper.
"In the bookstore. Just now."
He turned, as if to run there.
"They're gone."
"Gone!" Lorien grabbed me and shook me, "What? What did you do ? Why didn't you stop them. Wait, how did you know?" Her face looked like I'd just told her I'd got a date with Orlando Bloom. Complete disbelief.
"What was that line about Legolas? Fair of face beyond the measure of Men?"
"Whoa, you remembered the Book." She said sarcastically. "There's lots of gorgeous guys in the mall, banana butt. And all of them have round ears except him." she nodded at Legolas. "I don't suppose you got a look at their ears?"
"No. Their eyes. They had eyes like his. Like the space between the stars." I told them about the encounter, and how they'd left, vanished.
"Augh!" Lorien said. "You let them get away!"
"I didn't let them do anything, I think they didn't want to be recognized. The one almost said something, but his buddy stopped him."
"Augh!" Lorien said again. "Wait, you remember what they look like, so it's not like Nazgul Barbie."
"Yeah, but that doesn't help. They could be in the Yukon by now. I wish Legolas could have seen them!"
"Ok," Lorien said, "think like Sherlock Holmes here; what were they wearing? T-shirts that said anything?"
"A blue-grey bomber jacket. And...Uh...yeah, the one had weird hair, blue."
"What? Like Nightcrawler?"
Come to think of it, he did look a little bit like my favorite X-man, only I hadn't seen his ears. "No, no, not blue like sky, blue like a cat, like a grulla horse, a blue Doberman. That kind of Cooper's Hawk-bluey-grey color. And he could still be in the Yukon by now."
"Did they say anything?"
"Ahhh..." What was that word? I stretched my brain and heard it snap. "Tool...glue...crack."
Lorien grabbed me by the front of my jacket and nearly lifted me off the ground. "What?"
"Yule...spool, drool, cool, pool, tool...yeah, toolglue...poo...loo...tooloo...ack!"
"Tooloogack?" Lorien practically shouted.
"Yeah, yeah, that's it. You're the Elvish expert, what is that?"
Her eyes were the size of a five-year olds' on Christmas morning. "It's not Elvish. It's Baffin Island Eskimo."
"Huh?" Whatthehell Eskimos had to do with this, I had no clue.
"It means Raven. It's a chapter title in Mind of the Raven!"
"Why would an Elf speak Eskimo?" I said.
"I don't know! Wait, wasn't he wearing a bomber jacket... like a pilot's?"
"Yeah. So? Lots of people do."
"And oddly enough, his hair is the same color as our raven. And the one on the Jeep." Lorien said.
"What Jeep?" I asked.
"Have you been listening to anything I said!?" She thrust her camera under my nose and flicked to a picture of a fairly ordinary looking blue Jeep. Except that it had a raven logo on the side. In dark silver.
Legolas stepped between us and laid a hand on each of our shoulders."There was a feather of that color dangling from the mirror."
"Luthien." Lorien said. "Finrod."
"What?" I said.
"There were Elves in the Silmarillion who could shapeshift themselves or others."
"Yeah," I said darkly. "and so can Mystique."

Lothlorien
...maybe
It was nightfall before we found the place, hidden on a backroad that ran along one edge of the great State Forest. A half hidden sign marked a dirt lane leading off the main road; Hawk Circle Farm. It was a big, carved wood sign with a graphic of a red-tailed hawk silhouetted against a yellow sun.
Lorien leaned forward, squinting. "What does that say underneath?"
I braked Strider, backed up so the headlights shone on the sign. "Earth Life Foundation. Environmental Education and Research Center." That at least was promising. Anybody who was running an outfit like this couldn't be all bad.
Unless it was a cover for something darker.
Lorien climbed out, took a picture of it, and squashed herself back in the cab against Legolas. She remained oddly silent for several minutes as we rattled under huge trees, reaching over us in the dark like giant sentinels. Then her voice came from the far edge of the seat, "The acronym for that is E.L.F."
"Yeah. How the heck did we miss this place before? When we were looking for Elves."
"Of course, it could be a coincidence."
"Yeah, sure." Like a guy deciding to paint his raven logo dark silver instead of black.
"We'll probably have as easy a time getting in as Tuor had finding Gondolin."
"What?"
"The Silmarillion, bonehead. Ok, for the literature impaired; as easy as the Fellowship had getting into Lothorien."
"Yeah." I touched Legolas' arm, "What do you feel?" Just because they were Elves, didn't mean they were like Legolas' folk. And the ones at the mall had not wanted to be found.
"It is not like the great forest behind Dana's, or your place. This place is old. Full of energy and life. And the borders are protected. Can you not feel it?"
"Is that why my stomach feels like half a dozen moray eels are having a dance party?"
He didn't answer, he just kept his nose to the window, staring out at the huge trees.
The road wound on through trees that stretched dark and endless on either side. Lorien leaned forward occasionally, taking pictures through the window, or rolling down a sidewindow and shooting into a blast of cold air, the flash reflecting off the roadside tree-sentinels like lightning. To the left, north, I could see a good-sized stream following the road. Legolas leaned forward as if hearing something we couldn't. I caught a flash of movement to the side, a glimpse of something in the edge of the headlights.
A deer, I told myself.
"Odd." Lorien said softly. I glanced over and she was looking at the picture she'd just taken. She thrust it under my nose, and I caught a glimpse of something four-legged, and horned, glowing in the glare of the headlights. Glowing a little brighter than it should in my halogens.
It was late on a Saturday evening, if any of this was ever open to the public, it wasn't now. And that Jeep could be anywhere.
A light loomed through the trees, and resolved into a pole light over a barn I couldn't see. Another light nearby might have marked the house. A short lane ran toward the lights. There was a small sign that said Private Drive, and a rustic wooden gate. I slowed.
Legolas waved me on, then just past the lane said softly, "Daro."
"Stop." Lorien said. She bailed out as Legolas lept out, nearly over her. He caught up his bow, and I didn't stop him this time. He vanished into the trees.
"Wonderful." I said. An owl hooted, close enough to make me jump. I palmed my pepper spray. Lorien tiptoed up beside me, raised her hand.
The flashlight beam cut through the still dark like a lightsaber. Trees stood out like the pillars of Moria, branches tangling into a ceiling overhead, traces of Thanksgiving snow lay in hollows among drifted leaves, a half-frozen creek trickled with a sound like chimes. A few stars made their way through the tree-ceiling. A wolf howled, close enough to touch. I grabbed Lorien's hand, dousing the light.
"Wonderful. Now we're in the dark." she said.
"Something might see us."
"They probably already have. Was that a wolf? Or does somebody here have a kennel full of huskies?"
"Sounded just like a wolf." A few more yodeled in harmony with the first. "It is a wildlife center." I suggested. The pack harmonics rose and fell and wavered away into silence. I let out a breath, it was an oddly comforting sound, familiar, like Kodi's own song. I began to relax.
A shadow moved at the edge of my sight. I spun and raised the pepper spray.
Legolas raised a hand, "There are many strange creatures in fences, great cats such as I have never seen before, wolves, and a great, tall beast like," he stretched his hand as high as he could, "Tall as a tree, like an elk, but all neck and legs! I have never seen such a beast!"
"Was it spotted?" I asked.
"Yes, its coat bore a pattern like the shadows of leaves on a forest floor."
"Giraffe." I said, with some relief. "Did you talk to any of these creatures?"
"What do they know about the place?" Lorien said.
"They are happy, well-fed. Though they did not recognize me, my kind is not unfamiliar to them."
"There are Elves here then." Lorien said.
"So whadda we do? Just walk up and knock on the door?" I said.
Legolas shook his head. "There was a great barn too, weathered black by age, but I did not go in. I felt a great power there. And a strange scent, like..." he wrinkled his nose, "I don't know, I have never smelled it before."
"Great." I said. "Probably dragons or something."
Something big roared. I was hoping it was one of Legolas' cats.
We drove farther, and the road bent south. Behind us another narrower road went off like a tree branch to the north. We stopped, got out and listened to the night noises; the deep booming voices of great horned owls, more wolfsong behind us. To the north a faint glow, like more house lights, twinkled through the trees. South, I could see the sky glow of the city, and the nearer twinkle of more house lights, a cluster, like a farm. Ahead of us I could hear running water. I thought of the Nimrodel on the borders of Lothlorien, and Legolas' song of her. I felt a light touch on my shoulder.
"Which way?" he said.
"You're the Elf." I said. I turned to meet Legolas' eyes, like stars in the dark. I thought of how water guarded places like Lothlorien and Rivendell. Of how Evil couldn't cross it. "Over the stream." I said. "If there's a way."
There was a a rainbow arch of stone bridge that looked like it might have been built by Gimli's folk. The water flowed wider and swifter than I'd guessed, wide enough to have a narrow island in the middle of the creek. I peered over the edge of the stone wall bordering the bridge, half expecting a troll to jump out from the darkness beneath. Lorien took pictures on the other side. The road doglegged north and followed another small creek east again. More lights through the trees. A line of shadowy buildings in the dark. Then another road to the north, and a sign that said 'Library and Visitor's Center ahead'. There was another sign, a red rectangle with a white slash across it.
"What's that?" Lorien said, "No red?"
"It's a dive flag mustard brains, if you see it on the water, it means stay away, there's divers down."
"Why would there be one here, in the middle of Pennsylvania farming country? In the winter?" Lorien said.
"A dive shop, or maybe a diving quarry, like the one my aunt took me snorkeling in."
So far, the whole place seemed to be asleep. Something made me want to take the road to the north, the one unmarked by any sign, at least none I could see from this angle. I hung a left, south, and heard the crunch of well maintained gravel under Strider's wheels. Lights loomed large through the trees, and a big building, painted the color of beach sand in a sunrise, appeared on the right. I pulled up into a well-lit parking lot and we all piled out, staring at the door, and the sign on it.
Library closed.
"Well, what did you expect?" Lorien said.
Oh, I don't know, a hundred Elven archers to materialize out of the trees and take us to see the White Lady or something. The road went ever on, so we piled back in and followed it. It twisted and wound about through dark avenues of trees, past more distant house lights, over another small bridge. Then back over the same bridge.
"We appear to be driving in circles." Lorien suggested.
"Hmmmph." I turned and drove back to where I thought I'd seen the library.
Another building, the visitor's center this time, and another closed sign. I piled out, walked a few yards away from the mass of steel that was Strider, and checked my compass. It spun in useless circles.
"Legolas?" Lorien asked.
"Try that way, west," he said. The main track bent west, while a small trail that even a Jeep would have had second thoughts about, went south. I followed the main track till it passed the dive shop and ended at a polite sort of gate, a rustic wooden bar across the path. Quarry closed.
"Well, duh," Lorien said, "Who would be diving in the middle of the winter."
"They dive in the arctic, this has got to be practically balmy by comparison. All of 42 degrees, I'd guess." It helped that I was reading the sign on the wall by the door, the one that listed the temperatures at different depths. "Hey, cool, look at this, they have an underwater Christmas tree contest!"
Legolas was peering over my shoulder at the poster, containing a photo of last year's winner, with grinning divers floating by their tree. At least I think they were grinning. You couldn't tell with the regulators hiding their mouths. Legolas cocked his head, his eyebrows knotted up, "How did they get the little lights to work underwater? And what is all that strange gear they are wearing, and what..."
Lorien grabbed him and pulled him back toward the truck. "Later! We're on a mission, remember?"
We followed the road back the way we'd come, turned right and within minutes came to the main highway and a sign behind us, much like the one we'd seen coming in; Hawk Circle Farm. The farm had swallowed us up and spit us back out, without ever revealing its secrets.
"We should come back during the day." I said.
"Turn around," Lorien said. "I have a feeling."
I spun Strider around in the middle of the road and headed back in.
There was still that unmarked road to the north, it yawned half-hidden by the kinds of thick shrubbery that grow along streams. It leaped across another little troll bridge and a smaller track went off to the right.
"There." Lorien said, pointing to the smaller track.
We came to a dead end at something that looked just like a castle gate.
Closed, of course.
Legolas got out and vanished into a tree by the gate. A moment later he returned. "There was a small village of empty dwellings, more like shops than houses. A great arena, and a small stable." He looked like someone who's gone to Fiji and found a McDonalds, "Why would your folk build a village like those of the Woodmen?"
"What, did we drive into a time warp?" I said.
"It's a Rennaissance Faireground, sausage butt." Lorien said, pointing to a sign that directed the summer public to Ye Olde Privies.
"Oh." Duh.
To Legolas she said, "It's historical recreation. A memory of how it was five hundred years ago. Or how we wish it was."
He stood staring up at the great gates. "Five hundred years, just a ripple in the stream of time. Yet your folk have changed...much. More than the Eldar could have guessed."
I saw something on his face then, it looked the way gulls sound in the dark. I reached out and touched his shoulder, "Yeah. Come on, we should go."
He broke loose from his still stance, like a dreamer waking, "Yes. There are many lights farther up the road. And some activity."
We piled back in Strider and rumbled back onto the main track. Lights appeared through the trees. Lots of lights, strung in a familiar pattern.
"Hey," I said, "This is an airstrip. I think we found our Raven's nest."

PART THE THIRD

Some Wings for the Elvenkings, Under the Sky...
Lizard
A great noise came from the hangar, banging, swearing, a power tool that sounded like it could have delved Moria single-handed, and 80's classic rock cranked to the max. We crept in at the edges of the open end and peered in. The hangar was mostly dark, with a single work light dangling from its extension cord, glaring like a torch in the depths of Khazad-Dum. Blue lightning danced across the concrete floor and the curved metal walls. At the far shadowy end squatted a small Piper Cub type plane, and closer was a little helicopter that reminded me of a dragonfly. The sputtering blue light seemed to be originating from it.
"The chopper's the same color as the Jeep," Lorien said. "so's the plane."
And you didn't need Elf-eyes to see that the logo on the side of the chopper was the same raven design Lorien and Legolas had described, Ravin' Maniac.
"Now what?" Lorien whispered. Well, she didn't exactly whisper, you couldn't hear a whisper over all that Dwarvish racket. She kind of shouted into my ear.
Yeah, good question. Just charge in there like the Avengers or something? I looked over at Legolas, wondering if he had any better ideas.
He was striding into the hangar toward the source of the noise. And he wasn't wearing the bow.
Lorien and I looked at each other like Merry and Pippin at the Council of Elrond and raced in after him. We rounded the chopper to find a pair of coverall-clad legs sticking out of it and more noise coming from inside. We stood, watching sparks and the odd comment on the lineage and character of the chopper explode from the interior. After a minute or so the mechanic backed out, set down his welding torch and pushed up his mask. He eyed us, head to toe, one by one.
It sure wasn't Tulugaq.
He looked like the typical Yrch County middle-aged male; stout, hairy... and up to his armpits in grease. It took me a good thirty seconds to realize he was about a foot shorter than most of them, and his dark grey beard was braided and tucked into his belt. He hefted a hammer about the size of Gimli's axe and lifted one furry eyebrow, "It's kinda' late to book a flight tonight."
I looked at Lorien, she looked at me. Neither of us thought of anything intelligent to say.
"Charlie Durgin." the short bearded guy said. "Mostly around here they call me Doc."
I immediately thought of Happy and Slappy and Goofy and Derpy... or whoever. Lorien, of course, thought of...
"The Doctor?" Lorien sputtered.
"Not that one. The only screwdrivers here look like this," He held up a particularly large and sturdy looking Phillips head. It looked hand forged. "I'm the one who fixes things when they break." He eyed Legolas, from toe to eyes. His mine-dark gaze stayed on the eyes.
Legolas' face registered something like surprise. No, more like the look of someone who's gone to Outer Mongolia and met his next door neighbor.
"Durin?" Lorien said.
He kind of smiled, at least I think it was a smile, hard to tell with all that hair. "Dur-gin."
"Lorien." she said.
Both his eyebrows shot up like startled ducks. "There's not many as remember that name." he said.
His gaze returned to Legolas.
I looked at Lorien, she looked at me. Neither of us thought of anything intelligent to say, but you could have landed a small plane in our mouths.
"I've not seen you around here before." he said to the Elf.
"I have not been around here before." Legolas' face was a mask of diplomatic composure, but he said no more.
"The stranger should declare himself first, but I already have told you who I am." He was beginning to sound more like Thorin Oakenshield than a flight mechanic.
"Legolas Thranduilion." our Elf said, with a slight bow.
Doc's eyebrows couldn't go up any farther, so he just flumped down rather abruptly on a tool cluttered box. His dark eyes glinted out from under those brows like mine jewels. "There's even fewer that remember that name. How came you by it?"
"The usual way. By my mother and father."
"Thranduil being your father."
Now it was Legolas' turn to look surprised, "You know our tongue too?"
"Huh?" I poked Lorien.
"The 'ion' ending," she said in my ear, "you'd have to know Elvish to know Thranduilion meant son of Thranduil."
"Now that Thranduil guy," Doc said, "it wouldn't be the one in Mirkwood, son of Oropher?"
Legolas' face was nearly composed, but his eyes were the size of an owl's, "I know of no other! How do you know of us? From the tale? Is that how you know our tongue? As Lorien does?"
Doc studied all three of us, his eyes dark and deep as mine pits. He stood, "Come." He led us to a door on the other side of the hangar. He opened it and waved us into a room with a few comfortable and mismatched couches, a couple of tables, a microwave, cupboards and a fridge. "Have a seat." He opened the fridge and produced a beer. "Just help yourself." he added, popping the top.
I did, throwing a soda to Lorien and one to Legolas.
Doc plopped into a chair, low and covered with a big grungy towel, as if reserved for him and his working coveralls. He glugged his beer, his eyes never leaving us. Finally he set it down. "There's some folks who'll want to meet you." He produced a cell phone from a pocket and bleeped out a number. A moment later he spoke into it, "Hey, our anomaly just walked into the hangar."
My stomach was still doing the moray eel dance. Lorien was wandering around the room looking at the plane pictures on the walls, muttering stuff about C-130s and F-16s. Legolas had all the relaxation of a drawn bowstring.
I noticed there was a second exit. I thought of a thousand questions I wanted to ask the Dwarf, but he seemed about as talkative as a rock.
The door opened rather abruptly, and Tulugaq stood there.
I stood up.
"Hey!" he said in surprise, to me, then he smiled like sun rising. His sky-eyes went to Legolas, his head cocked slightly as if he wasn't sure what he was seeing. It made me think of birds, so did his nose; a strong sword shape like a raven's beak.
A couple of other people filled the doorway behind him. One had hair like frosted winter grass; the one from the mall, the one that looked like Galadriel's brother. They spilled into the room. Poured maybe, I don't think Elves spill.
And they had to be Elves. They all had the same kind of eyes, the chiseled edges to their faces, the lean, lithe build, like a wolf crossed with a greyhound. The natural grace of a stalking leopard. One was shorter, slender and agile-looking like Nightcrawler on Evolution, with that same kind of loose shoulder-length hair that was always falling in Evo-Kurt's face, only in bright, Little Mermaid red. The other was a woman with one eye the color of earth and one the color of winter sky and pinto hair that couldn't decide whether to be flaxen or white.
They all looked somewhat astounded.
Legolas was standing, between them and me and Lorien. There was a long stretch of silence, finally broken by Doc. "Legolas Thranduilion." he said, as if that explained everything.
"Wazoo!" redhaired Evo-Kurt said.
I didn't know wazoo was an Elvish word.
Mall Elf, Galadriel''s brother, stepped forward, and spoke to Legolas, "Aiwei, Awyrion ar Nawein." He glanced at me as if not sure he should have spoken that in front of mere mortals. He locked eyes with Legolas, and quiet words passed between them.
"They're speaking Sindarin!" Lorien whispered to me, "except Aiwei speaks with a different accent." The others moved in closer and began to fire their own questions at Legolas, in several languages at once. Soon it was like a whole treeful of spring warblers chattering. Doc kind of shrugged and retreated to his chair with another beer.
I was beginning to feel like a Hobbit in Lothlorien, kind of ignored. "What anomaly?" I blorted out. "And what do you know about it?" They all turned and stared at me.
"And you are?" Mall Elf said to me. He looked like an eagle, staring down at a rabbit from his aerie. I took a step back.
"Lizard, and that one is Lorien." Legolas said Lizard as if he was saying Luthien. "They have been my companions and guides in this strange land. Whatever you wish to say to me, you shall say to them too." The way he said it made it somewhat more than a request.
The others stood still, studying him, and us. You would have needed something the size of Gimli's battleaxe to cut the tension.
Finally Tulugaq broke into a disarming grin. "Come on." he poked Mall Elf in the abs with his elbow, "Everybody sit down and have a beer..." he glanced at the underaged among us... "or something. I think we need to talk to these kids."
Lorien and I sank into one of the couches, Legolas sat between us, leaning forward slightly. I could feel the tension in his body, like a cat ready to spring. Tulugaq perched on the back of the other couch, like a gargoyle, only hotter.
Mall Elf gave Tulugaq a hard look, "If it was up to you everybody on the planet would know."
"Looks like they already know." Tulugaq said nodding at us.
The girl with the pinto hair grabbed Aiwei son of whoever and sat him down on Tulugaq's couch. "It looks like they already know more than we do." She stuck out a strong-looking hand to me, "Tas. Tashunka Ross." she said. "Or Wolf." I shook her hand and nodded.
"Tashunka is Lakota for 'wolf'" Lorien whispered. "And Ross means 'horse', I forget what language, Anglo-saxon or..."
I poked her in the ribs, she shut up.
Tas grinned, a bit like Shenzi, some of the pinto hair fell over her eyes, like a horse's forelock. She didn't look at all like Luthien Tinuviel, or Arwen. She looked like she could kick the butts of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer combined.
"Zan," Evo-Kurt said. He hesitated, eyes going from Mall Elf to Tulugaq. "Alexander Fox." He hesitated again, searching my eyes. Finally, he said softly, "Mirzithan." His eyes were the exact sea-color of Legolas'. He was cute too, in a Billy Boyd sort of way, though he didn't look like he could kick anybody's butt.
"Brannan Hrafnson," Raven said, "Aka Tulugaq. Bran," he met my eyes with a trickster smile. "How'd you find us?"
"Your address is on your Jeep." Lorien said.
"How'd you know it was mine?" he studied me, but I didn't feel like a rabbit under his gaze..
"Tulugaq." Lorien said. She pointed at Aiwei, "Liz said he called you Tulugaq in the store. That's raven, in Baffin Island Eskimo. I remembered it from a book."
He looked surprised. But not too much. "Mind of the Raven." He pirate-smiled at Lorien. "And why would you be tracking ravens, eh?"
"I've seen one a few times." I said. "Not exactly a common sight around here. Especially not that color." I nodded toward his hair.
"Didn't think you'd notice me; at the barn, I mean, and on the trail."
"So that was you? You are some kind of shapeshifter, not just a good bird trainer?"
"That's my gift, yes."
"Like Finrod, or Luthien." Lorien said.
"Well, maybe that'd be like comparing an SR-71 Blackbird to a Piper Cub." he said, glancing at Legolas.
"Bran is raven too, it's Celtic." Lorien said. "And brannon is Sindarin for lord."
I poked her again.
"Yep." Bran said.
"Are we talking Odin, Morrigan, or...what was that Indian thing with the sun?" I said.
"Yes." Bran said. "All of the above. My family carries a trace of what Professor Tolkien would have called 'Maia' blood. We have the gifts associated with Raven...and other corvids; crow, rook, jay, magpie."
"About that anomaly thingie." I said. "...your anomaly thingie... has something to do with the Prince of Mirkwood, doesn't it? I mean, we kinda noticed too...that something was...different. That's why we're here. We figured the Elves might know of some way to fix... this." I wasn't sure what anomalies they'd seen, how many books or art prints or action figures they had that were different now. Or how much I should say right now.
"Somehow my action figure collection doesn't look like the ones they're selling online these days." Bran said. "
"Wish mine had stayed like I remember." I replied.
Mall Elf's eyes went from Bran to me to Bran. He looked like he was summoning a Spell of Endless Patience. "For future reference," Aiwei son of...whatever...said. "I'm Jon, just Jon." He leaned forward and met my eyes the way Galadriel might have, when she was reading people's hearts. No, maybe more like Thranduil interviewing the Dwarves who had crashed his woodland party in The Hobbit. His eyes were pale as ice and about as easy to read. "And, if you mention Elves to anyone outside this room, people will assume you are talking about Santa."
"Right." I said. "Of course. At least until we get Middle-earth straightened out."
"We should just send you two home." Jon continued. "With a slightly reduced set of memories." His eyes dropped to somewhere near Lorien's middle. Her eyes widened and she put a protective hand over her pocket. The one where she always stuffed her camera.
Legolas set a hand on my shoulder, and one on Lorien's. I couldn't see his eyes, but I could see the subtle reaction on Jon's face. He blinked and looked away.
"Like I said," Tas cut in, "they know more than we do."
"Yeah." Bran said.
Doc leaned forward on his chair, eyes glittering out from under furry brows, but he stayed silent.
Jon sighed, sat back and began rattling off a paragraph full of things like multiverse and singularity and multi-handled donuts.
Bran broke in, "This isn't Elf Trek; the Next Generation, and you are not Tony Stark. Speak English."
Jon shot him a loaded look, then turned back to me and Lorien. "...basically the Stream of Time sooper-dooper-loopered like a snake on hot asphalt and things in two closely connected worlds were changed." He gave me a long searching look. As if he just knew it was somehow my fault.
I squirmed and shot back a question. "How is it you remember Legolas, and all the rest? Nobody else remembers. Except us, I mean." I said to him. I glanced at Bran, "and did you mean your action figures didn't change?"
"Sphere of Influence." Lorien said, "We were in the sphere of influence. But you're..."
"This place isn't subject to all the vagaries of the Stream of Time." Bran said. He eyed Lorien, "Kind of like Lothlorien."
"Bigger on the inside," Doc rumbled.
"We would like to know how it is you happened to be in the, ah, Sphere of Influence." Jon suddenly reminded me of my math teacher. The one you don't hand your homework in late to. Jon looked like he could kick Xena and Buffy's collective butts too...and Saruman's, and Sauron's, and maybe Magneto's and Juggernaut's, and a few dozen orcs single-handed.
Lorien and I traded glances. She glared, I gulped. "Uh." I said.
"Keep going." she said.
"Ah, well...you see..." I began.
"Yaaaaaaaaas?" Lorien prompted.
"Er...ehh...um."
"Geek Patrol." Lorien said.
"What?" Jon looked as if she'd just handed him an artichoke.
Zan smiled at Lorien, as if he understood.
"We're the only girls in the whole school who know what a tardis is, and who Voronwe is, and can name every single crewmember of every USS Enterprise that ever existed and all twelve Doctors..."
"...thirteen."
"...not counting the War Doctor, he never called himself that..."
"...doesn't matter he was still..."
"WHAT HAS THAT GOT TO DO WITH SPACE/TIME ANOMALIES!" Swear to all the Valar Jon's eyes could have pierced mithril plate.
"Clearly you need to pay more attention to the BBC." Bran said. "Carry on," he said to me.
"Ahhhhh... ahhhhhh... ehhhhh... IgotthisspellfromthisladyIknowandI SWEAR Idid NOT mean to ripthePrinceof Mirkwood outofhisbath!" I kind of mumbled the bath part, hoping they wouldn't notice.
They're Elves, they have keen ears and a fine sense of language. They noticed.
Jon just stared at me, his face as sympathetic and readable as a hawk's.
Bran broke into a huge grin. Zan turned an amazing shade of purple trying not to laugh. Doc burst into a great guffaw. Tas swatted Bran's shoulder, open-handed. Then she punched Jon. Harder. She glared at Zan. He coughed and tried to look innocent and failed.
"Bet you would have paid to see that." Doc said to Tas. I think he meant Legolas fresh out of his bath.
She gave him a glare that could have roasted an orc. She grumbled something that certainly was what Lorien called Conversing Like A Mariner, I didn't need to know the language to recognize the tone. "Males!" She turned to me and said, "Was this supposed to be some kind of love-attraction spell?"
"Yeah, like I thought some guy at school would just, you know, ask us to Prom or something. I swear by Gandalf and all the Valar I really did not mean to screw up Middle-earth!"
Her eyes, one blue, one brown like Cherokee's, had a trace of sympathy. "Where did this spell come from?"
"That's just it, we don't know." I told her everything then; Nazgul Barbie, and the Shire, and snowboards, and dogsleds, even what Unci had said about Raven. And how Dana was trying to trace the spell, and find an antidote, but nobody knew anything about it.
Bran smiled at the mention of Unci, and her talk of Raven, then his smile faded. "We knew something was wrong the moment it happened, we could feel..."
"There was a great disturbance in the Force..." Zan cut in, his face considerably less serious than Bran's.
"I spent about a week trying to track where it started. Your backyard, it seems." Bran said.
"Well, why didn't you just fly down and ask."
His eyes suddenly looked about a thousand years old. "Right." he said, "Hello, I'm from the local Ministry for Mythical Creatures and I'd like to ask you about a slight disturbance in the space-time continuum."
"Oh. Yeah. Well. But didn't you see Legolas? You could have talked to him..."
" I was a little busy at the time, chasing some chick in hot Barbie pink snow gear on a snowmobile that should have taken another path. She didn't have the blackest aura I'd ever seen, but it wasn't pretty. I knew something was twisted in the timestream. I knew where it started, but I didn't know why. I felt like she was connected to it somehow. I could tell the dude in the crazy snowboarder hat was one of us..."
Lorien made a face at the mention of the Hat of Doom.
"... but he was with you all. And I needed to deal with the Pink Rider."
"Do you remember what she looks like?"
"Oh yeah." He made a face as if he'd seen the balrog himself.
I leaned forward, the morays were dancing in my stomach again, but for a totally different reason.
"What did you do?" I was hoping he'd kicked her butt into the next multiverse.
"Watched. She wrecked a ski on that mogul you took, and took a long walk back to an SUV and trailer."
"And..."
"She made a phone call. The guys from Bob's Rent-All showed up and hauled the busted sled out of the woods. Then they all went home."
Lorien let out an "arrghh" of disappointment.
"Yeah, we were there." I said. "At Bob's. They know nothing."
"I did get the license though." Bran said.
I leaned forward hopefully, maybe Bran had seen something we hadn't. Her vehicle license, or the trailer's?
"The SUV I saw with the snowmobile trailer belonged to the rental center. They told me one of their guys had busted the ski on a run, and they believed it. They had no memory of anyone renting that rig. And no memory of a chick in hot pink Barbie clothes."
"And, of course, no record of where she lives." Lorien said.
"Yeah, we got the same story. Like Mrs. Cotton and Sam the Shire. But at least we have a face for her now, right?" I said.
"Right."
"We do need to find her, don't we? To get him back, I mean." I gestured to Legolas.
"Probably."
"There is a way to get him back, isn't there?"
"Hope so."
"You're not sure?" The dancing morays sank to the bottom. Somehow I thought this would solve everything. They'd have some sort of dimensional doorway they could just open and send our Elf back to his bath and everything would be OK.
"Well, there's the Gate." Bran said.
"BRAN!" Jon stood. He looked like he was contemplating raven stew for lunch.
"Gate?" I said hopefully.
"Fool of a rook." Zan said under his breath.
Legolas stood suddenly, staring down Jon. "What secrets your folk hold will do no good here unless they are shared. These two," he gestured elegantly to me and Lorien, "have stood beside me in this strange land. They are part of my..."
"Fellowship." Lorien said.
Legolas nodded.
"This gate thingie." I said, adding the full weight of my glare to Legolas'.
Jon sat again and let out a resigned sigh. "Some of us learned the art, long ago, of opening gates to other...places...but as far as I have ever heard, there is no Gate to Middle-earth. In fact, we did not know it was anything more than a tale in a great book."
"Well, how come you all speak Elvish?" I said.
"I thought you were all leftover Sindar or Avari who didn't sail west or something," Lorien said.
"That is another world." Bran said, "Apparently one connected to ours as a branch is to a tree. But there is no Grey Havens here. Just the Gates."
"Our own tongues are varied." Tas said. "Not many humans speak Professor Tolkien's languages, and they proved a good common tongue to use among ourselves, when we wished no one else to hear."
"We thought the Professor would be amused." Bran said, "Elves speaking Elvish."
"Wow! Lorien said.
"We still need to find your Nazgul Barbie." Tas said. "She's at the bottom of this somehow. And she seems to be after Our Hero here."
"What does she want him for, anyway?"
"Who knows. What do Bad Guys usually want, mountains of gold, endless pizza, rock stardom, world domination or something." Zan shrugged and looked at the others. "Now what?"
nelphae: Legolas
"So there were some of our folk left in this place?" The round sun had not yet crept over the horizon behind them, that far edge of the Knowne Worlde they had left behind, was a faint streak of molten copper. Of late, Gimli had become used to sleeping until the sun was at least over the yardarm of the lower topsail, today, he wasted no time in sleep; there was a tale to hear and he had discovered that Elvish ship's food was more than adequate for a dozen Dwarves. And his appetite had finally adjusted itself to the roll of the sea. "And Elves!" he continued. "There were Elves there too! Why did they not sail west? Why were they still among the mortals?"
Legolas began a long paragraph full of things like multiverse and singularity and multi-handled donuts.
"I did not ask about their strange breakfast food, I only wanted to know about the Elves. And the Dwarf!"
"It is not breakfast food, it is..." the Elf's face contorted with an effort to find words the Dwarf would understand.
"Is this more of that Stream of Time stuff?"
"Yes."
"Ok then." Gimli sat back, as if satisfied that Legolas had just put the entire universe in a nutshell. "Go on."
Legolas gave him a long look, "You don't need to...?"
"There are Elves there, and they have a very strange concept of Time. That's all I need to know."
Legolas sighed, picked up his mug and drank a deep draught. "They were our folk, and yet they were different. Many of them had left, through the Gates, years before, as the world became crowded with Men and concrete and steel. As the forests diminished and whole species died out. But a few stayed, because they were needed."
"Needed?"
"Men needed them, though they no longer knew the Elder Folk existed. That is what Aiwei told me, for he had nearly gone through the Gates himself, then stayed. 'They need our wisdom, though they have forgotten, and the kelvar and olvar need us more.'"
"Olvar...plants, kelvar...animals. Living things." Gimli nodded, smiling with satisfaction at his mastery of his long struggle with the Elvish tongues.
Legolas smiled in empathy, then continued. "So some stayed, and tried to pass on their wisdom, in secret."
"Did they not...fade?" he said the word softly as if afraid to. Gimli knew of the many Avari and others who had not taken ship, and never would. "Or is that only a tale told by mortals?"
"Like most tales told by mortals, it has some truth in it. No, these folk would not become bodiless spirits, wafting through the gloaming, as some would have it, but they did not have the great wisdom that comes with living in the Blessed Realm. They were not quite 'a rustic folk of dell and cave', as Galadriel thought we would become, but they were not the Noldor either. There were many of mixed blood, as well. But their world was different, and so were they. Like a great tree that branches off into the forest canopy, each limb going its own way, yet all have the same roots."
Gimli nodded. He had come to appreciate more than solid rock and earth with good bones and the glitter of things found in caves. He had walked under the eaves of Fangorn and spoken with the treeherds himself. He had seen the tangled canopy of Mirkwood and the wonders of Lorien. The poetic imagery of his friend no longer sounded entirely like a foreign language. "Is that how your Stream of Time works too?"
"That is a good way to see it, yes."
"Well, what did you do then? Now that you had found some of your own folk. Though they seemed to have no more answers than you did."
"There were others who were wiser. We went to see the Grandmothers."
The Council of Possum Woman
Lizard
The road went straight north, then leapt across one of those little rainbow troll bridges, the dark beyond it was all rocks and roaring of swift whitewater. Legolas leaned out of the passenger side window of the blue jeep, Lorien and I squashed into the tiny back seat. The others had vanished a few minutes earlier in the same direction.
"There is a great Power here, can you not feel it?" Legolas said, pointing toward the east.
I looked out and could only see the dark shape of a hill rising against the stars.
"The Gate Hill." Bran said.
I squinted and thought of how it felt to be a tree. To see dancers in a new light.
Suddenly the whole hill lit up in a weird purple glow, brightest at the very top. No, not quite purple, some nameless color beyond the rainbow.
The Jeep jolted to a stop, gears ground, Bran turned and looked at me in astonishment, "Wherethehell did you learn to do that?" His eyes were dark shadows, lit with the faint light of stars.
"Uh." I managed to say. I glanced at Legolas.
"She has a gift. I showed her how to use it." he said.
"Whoa." Bran said. "I thought it was really strange that you...knew. When I saw you in the bookstore. Not many humans have that kind of sight. I wanted to talk to you then, but..."
"Yeah. I understand."
"Aiwei...Jon's as thick-headed as a Dwarf sometimes. He's got relatives who still live Underhill; in pockets of Faerie outside of the real world. A lot of 'em are royalty, with kingdoms frozen in time, going nowhere. At least he's out here, kicking butt."
"Well, it's not like you could just go around telling everyone." I said. Not at all like being an Elf in Middle-earth. More like being a mutant in the Marvel Universe. Except everybody knew about the mutants. And feared them. Or tried to kill them. I could picture all too well what the Elves would face if our world knew about them.
"Must be tough." Lorien said softly. "You have to pretend to be something you're not."
Like Nightcrawler with his image inducer on, I thought.
"More like Iron Man," Bran said out loud. "But then, he told everyone. I can't.. not everyone." He turned and regarded Lorien with starlit eyes, a hint of a smile, not piratey at all, crossed his face. "You haven't asked all the questions in your eyes."
"What was that you said about Maia blood? I thought you were all Elves?" I said.
"I'm Ravenkin. Elven, but one of my ancestors fell in love with..." he said a long, fluid word that not even Linguist Lorien could repeat. And he saw the look of confusion on our faces, "...he would have been kind of like Melian the Maia, Luthien's mother. An ancient being who embodied the spirit of Raven. It's his blood that gives my family our gifts."
"Cool." I said. "What's Wolf? She doesn't exactly look like Arwen or Galadriel."
"She's a pooka. An Elf who's learned the forms of wolf and horse. Her form takes on some of the characteristics of the mustang she followed to learn the wisdom and art of Horse." He paused. "She walked among the Lakota, and fell in love with one of them. He was killed in what your history books call the Indian Wars."
I couldn't think of anything to say to that.
"How sad." Lorien said quietly.
"Yeah." Bran said softly. "It was long ago and he'd be dead now anyway. But... yeah." He turned and threw the jeep into gear.
The sign at the end of the lane said Three Sisters Salvage: Antiques, Thrifty Necessities and Recycled Wonders. We drove through a last bit of dense woods, then into a circle of crisp white farm buildings surrounding a gravel parking circle and a couple of acres of grass and cheerfully sprawling bushes. A path led under a rosebush arch up to an old style farmhouse that looked like it was painted yesterday. To one side, lay something that looked like a garden under winter snow. The jeep lights swept across it, and a big black and white pony looked up, a straggle of vegetation hanging out of his mouth. He blinked in the light then turned and ambled off.
"Is he supposed to be loose?" Lorien asked.
Bran climbed out and hauled the seat forward for her. "He's our Guardian."
I stared off into the dark after the pony. I could swear I'd seen more of that weird flavor of light...
...in a sort of dagger shape springing from his forehead.
The door of the farmhouse opened into a big warm stone-walled kitchen, the kind of thing movie grandmothers have; herb baskets hanging from the ceiling, copper-bottomed pots hanging above a big butcher-block table, strings of onions and peppers and garlic hanging from the beams, big pottery jars with the names of their contents carved in them. There was a kind of wonderful clutter everywhere, magazines and books and antiquey looking things. Plants dangling from beams and shelves, sprawling far from their pots. A few empty aquariums that looked like they might recently have contained some small creature. There was an ancient muzzle loader hanging over the big stone fireplace, and crossed swords. And a Santa on the mantle. Jon/Aiwei, Doc, Tas and Zan, and a twenty-something blond guy I hadn't seen before, were already seated at the big table in the middle of the room, hovering over enormous mugs of hot chocolate and talking softly among themselves. The new guy was doodling in a sketchbook. He looked up and followed Legolas with eyes as green as new leaves. "I'm Ian," he said... he glanced back at Legolas, "Ian Greenleaf.
"Green... leaf?" Lorien said.
"I didn't pick it." Ian said. "It's Scottish. From some place named Green-lees in Lanarkshire. Means 'green meadow'. One of our distant relatives was a PA senator, another is a science fiction writer." His eyes followed Legolas.
"Legolas, Greenleaf, long under tree..." Lorien began. Then stopped. That poem was about the sea-longing.
Besides me and Lorien, Ian was the only other ordinary human in the place, and he looked like he might not be quite ordinary. That funny light played round his edges in leaf green the way it danced around Bran's edges in mountain-sky blue. He had a sweet face, broader and squarer than the Elves, and his build was more Malamute freighter than Siberian racer. Shoulder-length hair, two-toned brown and blond, was pulled back like movie Legolas'. He stood.
"Greenleaf, meet Greenleaf." Bran said amiably.
Something in the shadows at the back of the room went "graaaaanch granch granch" and I walked around the big center table to get a closer look. From its perch along the wall a black vulture tilted its head and gave me a bright-eyed once-over. One wing was taped, and there was a dead rat under its big turkey-like feet.
"Eeeeew!" Lorien said behind me.
"It's not like you can train them to be vegetarians. Or like you can go get a bag of Purina Vulture Chow."
Legolas stepped around me and offered a cupped hand to the huge bird. It dabbled its beak in the open circle of his thumb and forefinger, then stuck its whole head inside his lightly closed fist. He smiled and scritched its back with his other hand.
Lorien leaned in closer, "What's it doing?"
"Looking for food." he said. "It's how they eat. This one has not eaten yet today, she's feeling quite homesick."
"The naked head's so they don't have a bad hair day when they poke inside gooey gorey carcasses." I added.
"I know that. I just don't like making the aquaintence of the carcass." Lorien said eyeing the deceased rat.
Legolas picked up the untouched rat and hid it in his hands, the vulture poked its hooked tweezer-beak into his fist again, and began cheerfully yanking off bits of rat.
Lorien made a face, but managed not to turn green.
Something moved under the table. Lorien ducked, glanced under the table and surfaced with a startled "Yack!" She grabbed my shoulder and thrust me between her and the table, "There's a live rat the size of an orc under there." she squeaked.
I shoved her off and looked. Something with jaws like an alligator's yawned back at me. "It's a possum, barbie-brain. You startled it, that's why it's yawning at you."
"Oh. Of course." She ducked and looked again, a silver-furred critter the size of a big housecat stared back at us with bright dark eyes, through a maze of whiskers. Flower-petal ears turned and twitched towards us. Little pink daisy hands lowered to the floor again.
"Wildlife Rehab Inc." Bran said from behind us."Never know what you'll find in here." He crouched and picked up the possum, its pink tail coiling around his hand like a friendly snake.
"Yeah." Ian said. "Last week I came here for supper and found an emu in the living room." he paused, "Oh, don't use the downstairs bathroom, there's an otter in the tub."
"Cool." I said, watching Bran. The elvish way with all good beasts. I held out a hand and he lifted the possum into my arms. The prehensile tail wrapped around my wrist with a surprisingly strong grip. Just like Nightcrawler with less fuzz.
Lorien went back and stood beside Legolas, still feeding the vulture. Zan appeared at my shoulder with the biggest mug of hot chocolate I'd ever seen. He thrust it at me. I set the possum down and it trundled off to the other room.
"Hannon le." I said, automatically.
He gave me a little boy smile that almost looked shy. He looked like he was about thirteen or fourteen. Then he met my eyes, and his held the light of distant stars, the depths of the sea.
"You're older than you look, aren't you?" I said. Duh, he's probably eight hundred or something. Why can't I ever think of something intelligent to say to a guy?
He laughed, like a kid in a comic store, then his face shifted and he didn't quite look thirteen anymore, "Why do humans make such a big deal out of counting years?"
"Beats me. Don't you guys keep track of your birthdays? I mean, how do you know when to hit your buddies up for presents?"
"Maybe they give presents on their birthdays, like Hobbits." Lorien said.
"You'd have to give away a heckuva lot of presents in your lifetime if you were an Elf." I said.
Zan laughed. "I'm not sure exactly how old I am. I was found as an infant and raised by Dwarves." he shrugged, "Forty-something. But that's not the same as forty-something in your years. More like twelve-something, sort of." he made a face, "But not still won't let me get a driver's license, though."
"Bummer. How do you deal with school? I mean, if you spent ten years in high school, they'd start to ask questions."
"That's what the E.L.F. is for. For the mundane stuff like birth certificates, driver's licenses, credit cards. All that paper stuff that means you exist. And whatever else we need to survive in the human world."
I sat down in the chair he pulled out for me. He shoved a box of cookies in my direction. I pulled one out and laughed. They were Keebler Elves.
Over on my left, Ian was doodling again, glancing up now and again at Legolas.
Bran hopped up on the counter behind him and perched there, arms on knees, comfortable as a raven in a tree.
"Can I see?" I reached toward Ian's sketchbook.
"Sure." He slid it across to me.
The page he'd been working on already held several nice sketches of Legolas. In the rest of the book, superheroes and villains, mutants and Elves and dwarves and orcs and dragons leapt across the pages. Most of it was in a distinct comic book style, some of the characters were recognizable; Batman, Spiderman, X-Men. Others were originals. "Wow! It looks like you're doing your own comic here."
"Yeah."
"You should go to work for Marvel or something."
"Nah. I belong here. I'm doing my own, independent thing for Hawk Circle. Living in a city would make me nuts."
"Who's your favorite? Comic book character, I mean." I had a feeling I knew who his favorite Middle-earth character was.
He grinned. "I work for the E.L.F. I'm surrounded by Elves. So it would have to be Fuzzy Elf."
"Nightcrawler! Cool! Draw me one."
He got a slightly wicked look on his face, "And what would you like him to be wearing?"
I hoped I wasn't blushing as bad as I thought, and I hoped that one of his "superpowers" wasn't reading minds.
He'd been doodling for a couple of minutes when a shadow fell across his book. I looked up and saw Legolas' grey eyes studying every line. "You've got a nice sense of mass even where his costume is only a black silhouette. And the face is more like the original Dave Cockrum design, though your build for him is more like the recent work of Garney..."
Ian looked up at the Elf hovering over his shoulder and stared in disbelief. He looked at me, then back at Legolas who was still offering commentary on the illustration. Ian looked at me. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, then finally got words to come out. "Let me guess, you've been feeding him your collection."
"Uh, yeah."
"You know, if I open Lord of the Rings a year from now, and he's wielding a cutlass..."
"Yeah. You can come over and help Lorien paint my whole house puke pink."
The door opened and a small silver-haired woman came in, she trundled through the door in a great grey parka, with lots of pockets. She stood on one foot while kicking off her barn boots, watching us with bright dark eyes. "I'm Delphi." she said in a Grandmotherly voice. "Aura and Cora will be along shortly, they had some things to attend to in the barn." She shrugged off the parka and it seemed to catch on thin air. It hovered there for a moment and then drifted to a place on the coat rack by the door.
That's when I noticed it was being held up by about three feet of pink prehensile tail. She turned to find Bran perched among her cookie jars. "Bran!" she said.
He slid off the counter and caught the back of one of the kitchen chairs, swung a leg over it and perched on the back of it, balancing effortlessly on two chair legs.
"Hmph." Delphi nodded in approval, then her bright eyes fixed on Legolas. Her pink face broke into an impossibly huge smile, like an alligator's.
No, more like a small silver furred marsupial's. Then she padded over to Legolas in wool-stockinged feet. Toe socks, the kind with individual fingers for each toe. Really long fingers in this case, with a distinct thumb off to the side, just like possum feet. Delphi took Legolas' hand, in her small pink daisy hand and smiled up wordlessly into his face. He smiled back, with the kind of amazed look he'd had on his face when the Elves marched into Helm's Deep. When he was blond, and Orlando.
He looked like a kid who'd just seen Santa.
nelphae-a-min: Legolas
"They were not Elves?" Gimli said. The Grandmothers, he meant.
"No. They were..." and in a most un-elflike fashion, he could not find the words. "Like Gandalf, I guess." He said at last.
"Istari?"
"Something like that. Maiar maybe, or some kindred spirits. Three there were, the Three Sisters; Delphi, the Possum Woman, Cora the Crow Woman, Aura, the Vulture Mother. Beautiful they were, and old. Older than the great trees of the surrounding wood. Older than the worn hills behind the farm. The creatures whose shapes they sometimes wore, whose spirits taught them, were creatures who were experts at what they called 'recycling'."
"What?"
"Taking the old, the dead, the worn, and giving it new life. Aura was tall and very dark, the smooth skin of her head held not a hair, she had long arms that moved with the grace of wings, and eyes like the forest at twilight. She spoke little and listened much. Cora was small and the color of fresh baked bread, her long black hair swung free, like grass in the wind, and she talked most of them all. Lizard and Lorien told their story again, and the Grandmothers asked many questions."

Lizard
We'd just finished retelling our tale for the Grandmothers, it was like Galadriel times three. Or Galadriel and Elrond and Gandalf all at once. Or maybe Tom Bombadil, only without the silly poetry. If I thought they would hand me some kind of solution on a hand-thrown pottery cookie plate, I was sadly mistaken. They watched the three of us, me, Lorien and Legolas, with eyes even deeper than Elves', eyes like I imagined Treebeard's. The others stayed mostly silent, instead of chattering all at once as they had in the hangar. There were long stretches of silence where all of them seemed to be looking inward, to some far place, or exchanging silent thoughts with each other.
"What can we do?" I said at last, in the middle of a long stretch of too much quiet.
Possum Woman was opening her mouth to say something when the door blew open.
We all turned to find Dana in the doorway, hair and clothes plastered with snow, looking like she'd just skied down the Death Slope on her nose. Shenzi stood at her feet, grinning up at the nearest Elf.
Bran. The serious face he'd been wearing for the last hour broke and he grinned back. His chair swayed down to all fours and he slid off, crouching before her, holding out a hand. Shenzi came over and slobbered happily in his lap. Stupid dog.
Lucky dog. It was a nice lap.
Dana's eyes went from Bran, to the Grandmothers to Lorien and me and Legolas. She met Legolas' eyes for a moment then nodded, and closed the door behind her. Aura slid a huge mug of hot chocolate in her direction, and then I realized there'd always been an extra mug. Like they'd been expecting her.
Aura and Cora eyed Dana, exchanged glances. They looked at Delphi. "You forgot to tell YAWA again." Aura said.
"Oh dear." Delphi said. To Dana she said, "Did he give you much trouble?"
Dana glowered over the rim of her mug, pushed back a snow clotted piece of hair.
"Who?" Lorien asked.
"You see a pinto pony on the way in here?" Dana said.
"Yeah." I said.
"It's not a pony."
"Right." I said, remembering the weird light, like a dagger. Like a horn.
"And I wouldn't mess with him if I wasn't one of the Good Guys." Dana added. "Maybe even if I was one of the Good Guys. I dunno how you guys got in here."
"Yawa?" Lorien said.
"You And Whose Army." Bran said. "As in, who's going to stop me, you and whose army? Nobody knows his real name."
"You knew about this place?" I asked.
"Yeah, sort of, I mean," she nodded at Jon, "I brought him an injured hawk a few months ago. His girlfriend is a rehabber." She looked at Legolas, "I had no idea they were relatives of yours, though, or I would have brought you here right away."
"Uh, how'd you find us?"
"I've got my own palawntir."
"Pa-LAWN-tir?" Lorien said.
"The yard ball...you know, big shiny thing on the stand by the door? Shiny surfaces, birdbaths, mirrors of Galadriel; you use them for scrying, for seeing things far away in time or space." She sat down by Bran and began sucking down the chocolate. He got up and made her another one. "I figured out how Nazgul Barbie's been finding you, at least." Dana said. "And maybe we can use it to our advantage." She gave the Grandmothers a long questioning look. "Of course, it's not like we can call the cops on her or something."
Cora smiled, "Bring her here, we'll take care of the rest." She said it like she was going to ask Barbie to tea. Her eyes had a deep glitter in them, like a crow watching a squirrel run across a road in front of a tractor-trailer.
"So how is she finding us?" Lorien said.
"She has a palawntir too."

The Three Grandmothers sat at one end of the table, holding an in depth conversation with Dana.
You could have heard an owl feather drop in that room, because the conversation was going on totally on some other plane of existence.
It was like Professor Xavier times three. Their dark eyes glittered like stars in the depths of space. It made weird little fingers of ice walk up my back, and yet, it wasn't scary, not Nazgul scary. More like Galadriel at the mirror.
What will they see?
Dana blinked, moved and the spell broke. The Grandmothers turned their eyes toward me. "Dana remembers nothing of the spell. Only giving it to you, and the name of the one who sent it to her." Cora said.
Uh, yeah, I guess you want to walk around inside my head too, now? Ack.
"Yes." Aura said.
I sat my cocoa down with a thud and a slosh. "Ahhh."
"It may be the only way we find out anything about the spell."Delphi said, smiling widely. I could see her tail twitching against the cupboard door. It snaked up, twined around the pot of chocolate, and lifted it toward me. "Have some more, dear."
"Uh." I took it, poured a long one.
"It is not our way to break into someone's mind." Cora said.
"But you want to help your friend." Aura said.
I glanced at Lorien.
"I meant Legolas." Aura said.
That startled me. Friend. Mellon. I looked up and caught his eyes, deep grey in the warm light of the kitchen. I wish he could stay. I want him to stay. But... "Yeah, OK, whatever it takes. You think you can help me remember what happened with the spell?"
"Possibly." Cora said.
I nodded, "Ok, then."

Eyes full of stars, deep space between, the kitchen was gone, faded away into the depths of that starfield. Starfield becomes woods. The campfire circle. A moon shaped like a drawn bow. The search for a few green leaves. Some odds and ends of herbs and feathers from a bag. One of Lorien's mittens. The fire. Words that had no form, no sound. Forgotten words.
I was back in the kitchen staring at the Grandmothers. "Huh?" I said.
Cora frowned. Glanced at the others.
"What?" Dana said.
"What?" Lorien said, leaning forward.
Legolas leaned back against his chair, eyes shadowed, face unreadable.
"The spell is gone from her mind, but not because she forgot it. Because it was made that way. So no-one could change it. So no-one could reverse it."
"Wh...what about the other stuff? The feathers and stuff?" I said.
Aura shrugged. "Merely physical components. Props. The real magic comes from..."
"Elsewhere." Cora said. She frowned harder. "What feathers?"
"Didn't you see them? When you looked in my mind?"
"No." She glanced at the other two, they met her eyes but nobody nodded or shook their heads or anything.
"Feathers, yes, "Aura said, "but they were only shadows. I couldn't see their markings. Or feel what they had come from."
"They were big bluey-greeney things, like off one of those big macaws or something. At least, that's how I remember them."
"Maybe it is a false memory, changed by the spell." Aiwei said.
Cora nodded, "Maybe."
"And how is it that a human opened a Gate?" Aiwei continued, "One a Gatesinger didn't know existed?"
"That's what I'd like to know." Aura said.
The Palawntir
You shall count to nine, nine shall be the number of your counting. You shall count neither to ten, nor to eight, and eleven is right out. Nine is the number of the Fellowship. Camilla Sandman, The Official Fanfiction University of Middle-earth
Lizard
Bran and Ian, Jon, Zan, Tas, the Grandmothers reeled off the names. And Charlie, alias Doc. And Legolas, naturally, since he was the center of the Anomaly. There was no clear plan, only the need to track down our pink-clad Nazgulchick, and it looked like the Elves were taking on the job. The Grandmothers started suggesting other names, and I felt like Pippin at the Council of Elrond. It was Lorien though who leapt up and practically yelled, "But that will leave no place for us!"
Without thinking, I stood up beside her, even though those three Grandmothers probably could have roasted Gandalf's balrog without getting a hair out of place. Legolas stood and came between us, placing a hand on each of our shoulders, facing the Grandmothers. His grip was stronger than you'd expect from those slender hands, it welded us into one solid unit; The Three Friends.
Jon regarded me from across the table, with his usual unreadable hawk look. "I think your part in this tale is over." His voice had none of the deep resonance of Treebeard's; it was cool as whitewater, and about as sympathetic.
"Maybe not." Tas said.
"Yeah." Bran said.
"I doubt you will separate them from Legolas while he is on this side of the Gate." Ian said.
Doc stayed silent, watching us from under wolverine eyebrows.
"I think things are going to get messy, and you should stay out of the way." Dana said.
Zan stood, stretched himself up to his full heroic height, an inch taller than Lorien, and looked at me, "You have my, ah...well, ok, you have me."
Aura stared down at me, like a vulture contemplating fresh roadkill. Cora cocked her head, like Bran, eyes dark as hyperspace. She eyed Delphi. Delphi looked back with bright possum eyes, then studied Lorien and me, one by one.
You could have shattered the quiet with the drop of a cat whisker.
Then Possum Woman smiled her hugely impossible smile, "Well, of course dear." she said, as if we'd just asked if we could go to the movies.
We stared at her in stunned silence. I felt Legolas' hand relax on my shoulder.
"I will not ask if you know what you are walking into, because you don't." Aura said. "But if you wish to trap this...Nazgul Barbie...I think you will have to be part of the bait. And there is also the question of the Gate."
Cora nodded, "The others will protect you as they can, but this is your quest, you started it, you must end it."
I felt Legolas squeeze my shoulder. 'I'm here.'
'Hannon le.' I thought back.
"Me too." Bran said softly. He rose and caught my hands in his. Warm and solid and chiseled, like flight feathers. Like Legolas' hands. Then he turned to Lorien.
Ian came and stood beside us, one broad hand on my shoulder. He gave me a reassuring grin, like a big brother.
A voice, in eerily close imitation of Sean Bean, came from the table, "If this is the will of the Council, then Gondor will..."
Tas gave Zan a poke. "We're with you, girls." she said simply.
Doc nodded in agreement.
Jon met my eyes from across the table. He searched my eyes for a small piece of eternity, then his face shifted, as if he'd seen something he almost liked. His pale ice eyes warmed to grey dawn. He stood and with a princely nod, said, "And you have my bow."

Sunday Morning
Lizard
Lorien stood in the middle of Cherokee's stall, wielding the plastic sawdust fork with all the skill of Gimli wielding the Great Bow of Galadriel.
"Dude," I said, "the used shavings go in the wheelbarrow."
She blinked, like her brain was coming back from somewhere else, "Oh, yeah." Her eyes drifted to the barn door. Beyond, Dana's great palawntir glittered in warm solar swirls against the snow.
"I doubt you're going to make her show up any faster by thinking at her." I whispered.
She let out a breath and looked up at the rafters. Hidden in the shadows a big dark silver raven cocked his head at us. He let out a soft 'tck tck,' like dry sticks clicking together.
From the next stall came a snort, a pair of red ears flicked through a strawberry-blond and white mane. The pinto mare raised her head and stared at us, first with one brown eye, then with one blue.
"We've spent all this time avoiding her. Now we're trying to attract her. It's extremely odd." Lorien said.
"Scary?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah." I agreed. I reached for the empty space under my shirt where Dana's bag had hung. We weren't trying to be invisible now, so the bags had been left behind.
The mare let out a soft 'pprrrrrbth 'through her nose.
"We've got them." I nodded at the mare, and the raven in the rafters, and the spare barn help; one well-muscled blond and a red-haired kid in a Hulk T-shirt, jeans and Wellies. Ian looked like he could take on all the orcs of Helm's Deep single-handed. I had no idea what use Zan would be, other than to spout goofy movie lines at Nazgul Barbie, which would probably have the same effect as dropping hot butter on a live lobster.
A really big, really mad one.
Jon had vanished into the trees, like a Galadhrim guard, dressed in camo and wielding a longbow bigger than Galadriel's gift. Some cheerful banging and swearing was coming from Dana's garage, where Doc was doing some long-needed repairs. He'd brought a truckload of tools, and I didn't think all of them were for fixing broken machinery.
From the arena I heard Dana call a command to a young rider, Legolas came through the door, Beo walking quietly beside him. Amanda was holding his reins on the other side, a huge smile on her face, chattering to the Elf.
"How'd it go?" I called to Amanda.
She stopped in front of our stall, beaming, and looking better than Liv Tyler. She glanced at our Elf, "He's awesome."
I wasn't sure if she meant Beo, or Legolas. Probably Legolas. Beo nosed her in the back, the way he had the Elf. She wrapped an arm around the big horse's nose and hugged him, then smiled warmly at our Elf. He touched her shoulder with that warm, sweet smile that made me want to melt into a puddle of butter. Impulsively she hugged him, then wandered off to untack Beo.
Lorien and I stared after her. Lorien raised her hands and closed her eyes in a centering breath.
I raised my eyebrows in a question mark.
"I'm trying really hard not to hate her." she said.
"Yeah. Me too."
The spotted mare snorted from the next stall. It sounded like laughter.
nelphae-a tad: Legolas
"You are as dense as a mithril breastplate. Three women making great doe eyes at you and you bring none of them back." Gimli snorted.
"Ehhhh. Four. I think the pooka liked me too. I began to wonder if they really did know a way to send me home and weren't telling me."
"Would it have mattered?"
"Hmmmmm."

Lizard
We rode out later, Lorien looking confident on Pumpkin, Legolas on Loda. Ian had vanished into the woods earlier on Aiwe's trail. I pulled Cherokee out of his stall and Zan caught his halter rope, reached up and in one slick move, slid off the halter. He swung up on Cherokee's bare back, light as a cat, grinned at me and nodded toward the other pinto in the barn.
Bran dropped out of the rafters and sailed out the door with a great whoosh whoosh whoosh of wings.
I opened the stall door to "Wolf", and stood there looking stupid. The pooka hadn't said a word since she shapeshifted into horse form, good reason; horses, unlike ravens, can't talk. "Ummm." I said, wondering if it would be rude to put a bridle on her. She sauntered out, gave me a shove with her nose. I looked up at Zan.
"Hey, you wanted to ride Elvish style, right?" he gave me a mischievious grin.
I swung up, not quite as graceful as him, and we rode out onto the winter trails.
The horses moved from a light warm-up trot to a bounding canter. Loda stayed round and relaxed for a change. Legolas' expression no longer looked like a cowboy who hadn't got off his horse in years. Lorien let go of the saddle pommel with both hands, and laughed gleefuly. Bran floated ahead on broad silver wings, nearly invisible against the late afternoon sky. Under me, Wolf cantered, coiled like a dragon waiting to strike. I smiled, then grinned. "Yee-HAH!" She stretched out and blasted past the others. It was weird, that out of control feeling you get on the first rollercoaster hill, when you know if you throw your hands up you're gonna fly out and die. No reins, no saddle. For a hundred yards I crouched over her neck, clinging to her mane, then I saw how she floated over rocks and branches and little gullies the water had made across the trail. It was magic, she was a pooka, she couldn't put a foot wrong. I lifted my arms like wings and whooped. A moment later Loda and Legolas were behind us, and we were racing madly up the mountain.
We came to the top, and stood blowing, waiting for the others, Nazgul Barbie forgotten. I looked up for the familiar shape of silver wings and saw none.
"He's circling, a league or more." Legolas made a broad sweep with his arm. "He'll be able to see if anything's coming."
It didn't. Not that night, and not for the rest of the week.

nelphae-a-nel: Legolas
"All this waiting around for Nazgul Barbie to just show up. Baaah! If there had been more than one Dwarf at Hawk Circle, they would have tunneled her out, marched in and dealt with her proper like." Gimli's bushy brows twitched like annoyed wolverines.
"Patience, 'mellon nin. 'The hunter cannot run down the deer. He must use his head."
"Mine would have been bursting apart at the seams by now, and my axe restless in my hands."

Lizard
Saturday, a week later, the 22nd. We finished at Dana's, leaving the Elf guard for the night, Ian, Zan and Wolf, in charge of the barn. Doc had gone back to Hawk Circle, Aiwe was doing a lecture somewhere, Bran had a late flight to run for the E.L.F.
"Does it involve sacks of toys?" I kidded him.
He just gave me a lopsided grin and drove off.
Legolas and Lorien were still in the barn, improving her Elvish skills. I had a sleighload of stuff to wrap for Family Christmas on Tuesday. And for the E.L.F. Christmas party the next day. I threw a last look back into the warm barn light.
Sigh. Maybe I should take up linguistics.
I gunned the engine and headed for home.
Two hours later my cell rang. Legolas' voice had an edge like one of his knives, "Lorien's mother called and asked how late she was going to be. She left here an hour ago."

I'm Dreaming of a Blue Elf Christmas

Hey, this is me, Lorien. I had to write this part because Lizard wasn't there. Legolas either. It screws up the point of view aspect of the story a bit but...
Ok, Lizard's telling me to shut up and stop with the English 101 Lecture of Doom (her words) and get on with it.
Hmmm, I guess it kind of spoils the surprise element too, I mean, here I am, and obviously I didn't die or anything or I wouldn't be writing this, so...
Ok, OK! I'll get on with it.
...it was dark. Of course it was dark, it's always dark inside your eyelids. No, darker than that. Not even that kind of red glow you get when you shut your eyes and light comes through anyway.
Dark.
And cold, like the inside of a cave.
And why was my German teacher asking me if I was awake. Wha...? Did I fall asleep in class again? Wait, it was Christmas vacation...And why did Mrs. Spahr sound like a guy?
I blinked my eyes open and it didn't get any lighter. My head was on something warm...it occured to me that it felt like somebody's leg. There was a hand on my forehead. I reached up and touched something warm and velvety...exactly the texture of the soft end of a horse's nose.
Uuuhhhh, yeah, a hand in velvet gloves. Nana had a pair of velvet winter gloves but she didn't have a German accent.
A German accent?
"Easy junge Frau, it's OK..."
My hand twitched over the hand on my forehead...and some bizzare corner of my subconcious counted fingers.
Two.
Two?!
And a thumb on the side of my rather fuggily foggy head.
I sat up rather abruptly, and the unseen hand slipped to my shoulder. Sitting up was a bad idea, my head felt like somebody'd shot a lightning bolt through it.
"Oooooowwww!"
"It's OK, it will pass." the voice was low and rich and would have been really sexy if my bloody head hadn't hurt so much. I turned to look, and something materialized out of the abyssmal dark.
Luminescent eyes, glowing yellow like the eyes of a predator seen just beyond the safe circle of a campfire.
One's instinct in situations like this is to run screaming into the night. But the hand on my shoulder was still there, and the voice coming from somewhere below the odd eyes was reassuring.
And it all seemed eerily familiar.
Tick, tick, tick, tick...my mental calculator added it all up, despite the lightning bolt, and came to the conclusion...
I was still out cold and having a hallucination.
No, your head couldn't hurt this much in a hallucination.
The yellow eyes blinked out, then on again, then tilted apologetically, "Easy, I'm one of the good guys."
I reached for the eyes, clapped both hands on the side of his head. "Holy..."
His face felt like a velvet horse nose too, and there was a mass of tousled curls nearly covering a pair of ears like the new opened leaf of a beech.
Just like Legolas'.
"...miiiiiist!" I breathed.
The voice took on a slightly desperate edge, "It's OK, don't panic, I'll get you out of here, I promise..."
I dropped my hands to shoulders, muscled like a gymnast...or a circus aerialist...and clad in something that felt like a t-shirt, slid them quickly down his back to a tight butt clad in ordinary jeans.
"Hey!" he said.
Smack at the end of his spine was a hole in the jeans big enough for three plus feet of velvet covered tail.
"HEY!" he said, and the rest of the tail wrapped around my wrist and yanked it back to a more virtuous position in front of his chest.
"Nighty?" I questioned. I knew the answer. If Nazgul Barbie could come up with a spell to yank Legolas out of Middle-earth...
"Was?"
...nailing an X-Man would be easy. "Fuzzy Elf!" I practically shouted. Comic geek Liz was totally going to kill me.
"Unglaublich! The eyes widened, the tail kept its boa death grip on my wrist. "How...?!"
"Relax Kurt. I'm one of the good guys too. I'm Lorien. I..um...heard about the X-Men. All good stuff."
From Liz, of course, who dumped thirty years of the books on me after I told her I thought Alan Cumming was the best thing in the movie. 'Paybacks,' she said, 'for making me read LOTR.' Paybacks are a big hungry dragon in heat. Neither of us would ever be able to have a round-eared guy again. If we ever got a guy at all.
And I am NOT telling you about the blue velvet body pillows.
The tail snaked away, and was replaced by a hand. He raised my hand to his lips and gave it a chivalrous kiss. "Would that we had met under better circumstances my lady." I could almost hear him smile. "How do you feel now?"
""Mir geth es gut, danke." I told him. I'm fine, thank you."Although a minute ago my head did feel like Storm emptied a whole mess of lightning bolts into it, but it's fading now. How'd I get here? How'd you get here. Where is here anyhow?"
The eyes widened slightly, "You don't know? You were there."
"Huh? There where when?"
"When I arrived..." the eyes narrowed as if he was considering something. "You don't remember the spell?"
"Spell? What spell?"
The twin suns of his eyes regarded me for a long moment, "I was reading, in my favorite tree, and then, fzzzztt there's this flash of green light and I'm here. It looks like a basement, like you see in some of the farm houses from the early 1800s. All stone walls and dirt floors, big beams in the ceiling. There was a woman, and a strong smell, not a pleasant one. And you were there, saying something, like an incantation." His eyes moved again, tilted, as if he was puzzled, "I didn't look closely at you then, I was a bit preoccupied by the woman and the fire. She smiled at me, like a hyena smiling at a wounded wildebeest, and I could feel her trying to do something to my mind."
"She's charmed us that way before too. Then what?"
"She became angry when it didn't work. You don't spend most of your life living with telepaths without learning some defenses."
"Cool!"
"She blasted me with some sort of...force beam, magic, I don't know. When I woke up you were here too, out cold."
"The last thing I remember is leaving the Greenwood." I said.
"Where?"
"Dana's stable."
"I thought I smelled horse."
Oh great. Geek Girl Embarasses Self by Meeting Hot Superhero Smelling Like Horse Poop.
"It's a good smell," he said quickly, "reminds me of my childhood in the circus."
Oh, yeah, he can see in the dark. Must have seen my terminal embarassement. Ack, and the fangirl drool. "She must have opened another Gate. A Portal. Like the Well at the Center of Time or something. And it looks like she used me! I swear, I'm going to fry her a..." I clamped my teeth on the last bit. At least for awhile this guy had been a priest.
"Wait, portal? To where? And how do you know about the Well?"
I hesitated, it was too weird to explain to him.
Or not. This is the guy who has battled aliens, demons, evil mutants and other heavy duty weirdness his whole life. Falling into a world where he and his buddies were a comic book should be about as oddball as a Sunday picnic. "It's in the comic."
"Eh?"
"Um, you guys are all in a comic book, that's how we know about you."
"Ehhh? I don't remember any comic, Superman, ja, Batman, Spiderman, Elfquest, but..."
"You're not in Kansas anymore."
"From the woman's accent, I'd say northeast coast America."
"Unless Nazgul Barbie's changed her game plan big time, I'd say we're still in southeast Pennsylvania."
"Nazgul Barbie?"
"It's a long story. And you're not exactly in the Pennsylvania you're familiar with. If you drove north to New York, you would not find Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, or any other mutants, because they don't exist in this world. Except in the Marvel Comic."
"Ach. Some sort of parallel universe." The pale eyes bobbed as if he was nodding.
"Ja." I said. I love a guy with brains. "Happens to you all the time, doesn't it?"
"Another day, another adventure, another alternate reality."
"Wonder if anyone knows I'm missing yet?" I wobbled to my feet, felt a hand catch my shoulder. "Let's get outta here. Wait, do you always have to see where you're going to teleport?" I didn't ask something stupid like why he hadn't 'ported me out before, it was kind of hard on passengers, and on unconcious ones, worse.
"It helps. But I have done blind ports before."
"No windows in here, eh?"
"Nein."
"I wonder how much Nazgul Barbie knows about you..."
"My 'porting ability has been jammed before."
"Try it."
The hand left my shoulder, and the eyes blinked out as he turned. "Don't move." he said.
There was a flash of brilliant purplish-fuschia light, piercing after the total darkness, and a waft of scent like a science experiment gone horribly wrong.
Bamf.
Bamf. The fuschia flash was twenty feet farther away, with a vague, tallish silhouette in the middle of it.
"Whoa! That is so cool!" I said, sounding appallingly like a fangirl.
He walked back, silent as any Elf. I felt a hand on my shoulder again. "Wait, I'll be right back."
"Be careful Fuzzy." I squeezed an arm that felt like a hunting leopard's; all velvet and hard muscle.
"I will." the voice receded toward the far wall.
Flash-bamf-blam-thud-bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-crash.
A long stretch of silence.
"Nighty?" I groped forward in the dark toward the last sound. Somewhere around my feet I heard a faint groan. I dropped and began feeling around on the cool dirt floor, until my hand tripped over a jeans-clad leg. I felt my way up to his head, "Nighty?"
"Oooooo."
"What happened? Are you OK?"
"I get run over by a herd of mastodons every day." he said faintly.
I remembered my first aid training, and since he was breathing and talking, I wouldn't have to do mouth to mouth (darn). I ran my hands down his arms and legs, "Anything broken?"
"My pride. I'm really glad you couldn't see that."
I moved and my knee came down on something snakey.
"OW!"
"Oh, sorry, forgot about the tail." I ran my hand the length of it, "No kinks."
"Just a few sailor knots. Ehhhhhh."
I touched his head and felt something warm and wet. Great, he's bleeding, and I've left the first aid kit in the car. Wherever the car is. I dived into my jeans pocket, yeah, there, the handy dandy all purpose Swiss Army knife from Dad. I knew each tool, even in the dark, and found the best blade. "Hold still." I said to Nightcrawler. I plucked up the front of his shirt and began slicing.
"Hey, that's my favorite Star Trek shirt."
"Classic, or Next Gen?"
"The original, of course," he put a hand against my shoulder, fingers spread. "I can do the Vulcan live long and prosper thing with both hands, easy."
I giggled. "So, did you ever try to tell anyone you got your head caught in a rice picker?"
"It didn't work for Spock either."
A strip of cotton came away, I folded it into a reasonable excuse for a bandage and pressed what I hoped were gentle exploring fingers to his forehead.
"Ow, there, I think."
I finished wrapping his head and sat back.
"Sehr gut, danke."
"Bitteschon. Guess we're not 'porting out of here, huh?"
"There's some kind of force field."
"Yeah, figures."
I heard a faint rustle as he sat up. "There will be another way." he said quietly.
"Yeah, somebody'll miss us, they'll come looking for us, eventually they might even find us." Lizard's moray eels made an unannounced visit to my stomach. It hadn't occurred to me why Nazgul Barbie had bothered to kidnap me.
Until now.
"That's it. That's why she nabbed me. Maybe she used me in the spell, like she used Liz. But there's something else. She wants them to come looking for me."

nelphae-a-canad: Legolas
"Something finally happened!" the Dwarf was leaning on the rail, almost enjoying the gentle roll of the ship in the swells. He grinned gleefully, fingering the edge of a non-existent axe. "What did you do?"
"I had called Liz, she threatened to bob my ears if I did not wait for her. She was there in a heartbeat, and I gathered Ian and Zan and Tas, while Dana dealt with Lorien's family, making some excuse for Lorien's absence, backed by magic, so they would not call the police. I also took the dogs, Shenzi and Kodi, for dogs can see things even Elves cannot. We took Tas's SUV..."
"Do they never give anything a proper name?"
"Sport Utility Vehicle. Bigger than a Jeep, fits more people than a truck."
"That's even..." Gimli paused, unable to find words which would reveal the depth of his disdain for such an empty name.
"Well, she called it Windrider."
"That's better."
"We followed the route Lorien should have taken home. We found her car pulled into an empty field. Though only Zan, the illusionist, could see that it was Lorien's car."
"What?"
"It looked like a cow."
"Eh? Why would Nazgul Barbie want to turn Lorien's car into a cow?"
"She didn't turn it into a cow, she only made it look like one so no one would find the car. There were remnants of magic about it...magic we might be able to trace."

You Can Bamf if You Want To...
(is it safe to bamf?)
Lorien
"She wants who to come looking for you?"
"My buddy Lizard, the rest of the E.L.F. No, she really doesn't want them, though they'll probably come. She just wants Legolas."
There were a few beats of silence. I really really really wished there was some light in there, or that I could see in the dark like Nightcrawler. I tried to imagine his expression. Or maybe they'd never heard of Tolkien in his world. Then a softly accented voice came out of the dark.
"Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree, in joy thou hast lived, beware of the sea,
if thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore, thy heart will then dwell in the forest no more."
"Whoa! You've read Herr der Ringe?
"Many times."
"Wow, Liz said you were a fan of swashbucklers and pirate movies, but..."
"Liz? Lizard? How does she know?"
"She's the biggest comic book geek ever."
"Ah." Silence. He was probably calculating the hazards of hanging out with two rabid fangirls.
"Legolas." he said, "Why does Nazgul Barbie want Legolas. And you mean the Legolas, the one from the book?"
"Yeah, she made up some kind of spell, somehow it got to Liz, and Legolas got yanked out of his bath in Mirkwood on Halloween night and dumped in Liz's backyard. And Nazgul Barbie's been trying to get him back ever since. And now she's got you, too."
"Why?" he said softly, as if to himself. "What have we in common?"
"Pointy ears." I said.
He laughed.
I told him the rest of what had happened, the Cliff Notes version. After all, we still had to think of a way out of there.

nelphae-ar-leben: Legolas
"The roads of that land weave a web more tangled than the ancient webs of the Mirkwood spiders. At every stop or turn, we had to get out of that little metal box and sense what the wind and the earth and the trees had to tell us. We made many wrong turns, and lost the trail over and over. Tas ran for miles over the snow in her horse shape. I ran on the snow with Shenzi and Kodi, and I climbed dozens of trees, listening to the nightwind, to the speech of nightbirds, to the whispers of such creatures who were abroad in the dark; possum, skunk, coyote, owl. Ian, though a Man, could draw on the power of the earth itself. Even Zan, who was very young, could see shimmers of magic we could not. Liz paced back and forth, feeling useless, and twirling her bo staff, as if readying herself for a battle. It was late when we came to the Great River, and there we lost the trail." The Elf fell silent for a moment, and his face registered an emotion familiar to Gimli. It was the face he had worn when they followed two kidnapped Hobbits over forty leagues and five of Rohan grass.

Lorien
We perched on an old bench, leaning against the rough stone wall. I couldn't imagine how long we'd been there, hours, days, a lifetime.
And eventually, I'd have to go to the bathroom.
No problem for Mountain Woman Lizard. She even knew which leaves were safe to use for toilet paper. But I was trapped in somebody's icky dungeon cellar with a billion spiders and rats and one superhero whose powers were efficiently short-circuited.
And he was a guy.
Unglaublich.
"Um, excuse me." he uncoiled off the bench and his quiet footsteps vanished to the far end of the room. I heard small rustlings. Something tiny walked over my shoulder. I leapt up, bonked my head on the underside of some sort of storage shelf and swatted desperately at what was probably a whole horde of black widows. I managed not to scream and look like a total idiot Damsel in Distress.
The footsteps returned. "Um...we may be here for some time, so, ah...the floor is dirt, and ah...well, you can...uh... improvise."
I smiled and tried to imagine how a blue fuzzy guy would blush. "Any ideas? On escaping I mean."
"My head's still a little scrambled, I think, so, I cannot really think." The bench creaked slightly as he sat. A light scuttling sounded far too close for comfort.
"What is that?"
"A frumious bandersnitch."
I recognized it from the Nightcrawler miniseries. I giggled, poked him hard in the shoulder, and felt him sway, then I heard a chuckle. "Just a couple of really big rats."
Liz's morays jitterbugged through my gut. I opened my mouth and managed to say, "Oh. Is that all. I hear they're vegetarians. Anyway, I have a superhero to protect me."
"I believe they are omnivores. But I will do my best my lady." he said gallantly.
Something moved alongside my leg and I realized it was his tail. The end was twitching against my foot, like a cat trying to figure out how to get through the window to the birdfeeder. "Must be cool, having a tail." I said.
"You learn to go through doors fast."
More silence. No sound from upstairs either. If Nazgul Barbie was home, she was sleeping. The basement was cold as a cave. Off in a corner a furnace hummed, something else gurgled. A furious squeak was cut off in mid-sentence.
"What...was that?"
The tail tucked reassuringly against my leg. "Nothing."
"Right. It sounded like it got murdered."
"Ach, yeah. Everybody should have a ten-foot black snake in their basement. Keeps the giant rats under control."
Ulp. This was Mountain Woman Liz's department. She'd probably be groping around in the dark trying to catch the verdammt thing. "I hear they're, ah, harmless."
"Ja." Nighty was a big, warm presence, perched beside me, like a gargoyle, elbows on knees, hands holding his head.
"How's your head?"
"Wunderbar."
Obviously it wasn't. "Think you can teleport again?"
"Oh, yeah, the other end of the room's warmer."
"No, no, you can teleport with stuff, right? I mean, like part of something."
I felt him move and the golden eyes turned toward me.
"Like, say, a door?"
The eyes regarded me for a small eternity. I heard him smack his head in disbelief, "Ach!" then "Ooooohhh! My head must be more scrambled than I thought." He moved off the bench, catching my waist with his tail. "Stay close."
I followed him, connected by a blue fuzzy lifeline. Something else scuttled out of the way practically under my feet. I clamped my teeth on a scream.
"Relax, those are just the little ones." He said. "Only twenty pounds or so."
Yeah, the tail, he must have felt me jump. "I'm fine." I lied.
We stopped. He put his hands on my shoulders and gently moved me to one side. "Stay here." he said. I heard the faint sound of feet on stairs, a scrape, then...
BAMF! And a huge hole blazing light appeared above my head. Somewhere behind me there was another bamf and a muffled thud. "Nighty?"
"I'm ok. That was just the door falling."
I looked up into warm light; a twenty-five watt bulb illuminating a hallway. I turned to see Nightcrawler come up beside me, still little more than an indigo silhouette in the dim light.
"Stay close behind me." He went up the steps like a leopard running up a tree. I scrambled up behind him, expecting to see Nazgul Barbie waiting at the top. I mean, nobody could have slept through all that noise.
The hall was empty.
He caught my hand and slipped down the hall on the balls of his two-toed feet. Bare feet, I noticed. And the jeans and light t-shirt suggested he'd been yanked out of summertime New York. Wunderbar, I wonder if superheroes are immune to frostbite. Iceman, Elsa, Jack Frost, Hulk, Wolverine...not Nighty. The hall opened up into a kitchen on the right, and a living room on the left. The kitchen had none of the hanging herb charm of the Grandmothers' kitchen at Hawk Circle. This one was all shiny and sterile as if Nazgul Barbie always ate out, though the whole room somehow looked expensive. A few small security lights glowed icily out of hidden places in the edges of the ceiling. There wasn't a plant or cat or Golden Retriever in sight. Not even a big nasty demon dog. The living room was all in shadows, except for the glimmer of light on something dark and shiny and round.
Nazgul Barbie's palawntir.
"Nighty, wait." I stepped into the shadowed room, onto deep million dollar carpet, only to be pulled up short by a length of blue tail.
"We should go now." he hissed, and it wasn't a request.
"We should take that..."
"Now." He whispered and pulled me back out into the hall. We passed two more rooms, smaller, doors invitingly ajar. One was lined with books and from the other came the flicker of a screen saver.
We reached the door. I piled up close behind Nightcrawler as he reached for the knob, his tail still snaked protectively around my waist. I half expected the door to have some sort of protection on it, or at least be somehow locked to keep us in...
Click.
The doorknob turned, the door creaked open, like a sound effect in a horror movie. Nightcrawler swept me up in one arm and, as if he were swinging from the rigging of a pirate ship, leapt across the porch and the four steps down into the snowy yard.
A bolt of light the impossible color of a headache hit him square in the back. We rolled and I came up gasping and snow-covered. Nightcrawler stayed sprawled in the snow. Nazgul Barbie stood on the top step, one hand smoking, "Do you really think I'd let you get away so easy?" Her face had all the charm of an annoyed rattlesnake.
Face, I finally had a clear look at her face, and for a supervillainess, she looked remarkably ordinary. Average face, average build. A little too much Revlon, and nobody, not even Galadriel, could be that shade of blonde. I crouched in the snow and began to remember how to breathe. Now, if I could only remember how to think. Yeah, think, think of something...like what? Nightcrawler is down for the count and all I've got to work with is linguistics and a lot of snow. "You know," I said, "this is usually the part where the villain goes into great detail about why they're doing what they're doing, and how evilly they're going to do in the Hero..." Which, of course, gives the Hero enough time to come up with a Plan. As if I can do anything against Sauron's favorite bimbo, Magneto's Handmaiden. Aaaah. What would Nightcrawler do? Or Legolas? Or Mountain Woman Liz?
"You've been reading way too many comic books." Barbie quipped, she was smiling. Kind of the way hyenas do when they've got the Kill of the Week cornered on a cliff edge.
Something moved against my leg. Nighty's tail, and there was a pattern to it that was not random.
Playing possum.
A distraction, he'd need a distraction. I stayed kneeling, one hand still behind me, out of her line of sight. Working up a nice little fastball special. "What is it with the Elves, anyway, trying to collect the whole set?"
The smoking hand started to glow, "If I didn't need you in one piece, you little twit, I'd cheerfully send your liver to Outer Mongolia."
I hissed something under my breath, in German, hoping Nazgul Barbie would take it for a curse.
And I threw the snowball. Iceman himself couldn't have done better, it hit her square in the nose in all its hard-packed icy glory. Behind me there was a flash of fuschia light and the smell of a science experiment gone horribly wrong.
I always wondered what would happen if a fairly tall acrobat suddenly appeared on the shoulders of a five and a half foot tall woman standing on slippery steps wearing nothing but a silk nightie.
"Yeeeeaaaaaggghhhh!" Bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-splat. She landed face down in the snow and Nighty didn't wait around to see if she was staying there. He wrapped himself around me, arms, legs and tail and the world vanished.

nelphae-ar-leneg: Legolas
Tas paced up and down the bank of the river. Zan sat in the snow, little lights flickering on his fingertips. Ian hunched on a rock, in a pose more like his friend the raven. Liz hunched beside Ian, mirroring his pose. The dogs lay at their feet, but with sharp, watchful eyes. I stared down the Great River, lights like stars danced on its edges, reflected in its water, partly frozen now. A few miles south great towers rose, lit like torches.
"She's not trying too hard to cover her trail." Tas said. She frowned. Looked at me. "Legolas...you especially seem to be able to find it, though not easily. She should be able to hide it better."
"She wants him to find it." Zan said.

Lorien
Yeeeeaaaaaaggghhhh! It felt like the first hill on the rollercoaster, when you're dropping straight down at approximately the speed of light and every atom in your body is trying to fly off in a different direction. I'd heard the space he 'ported through described as a different dimension, but I think dimension and time and space had no meaning there. We were there for a second, for an eternity, and then the world bamfed into focus around us.
"Whoa!...COOL! Can we do it again, can we? Can we?"
"You know, most people need a barf bag after that."
I swayed and looked down. Waaaaay down. My arms were still locked around Nightcrawler's waist and I kept them there. We were perched, like a raven, about a hundred feet up in a tree.
"Kuuuuuuuurrrrt!"
He sat us down and wrapped his legs and tail around a branch, not for himself, but to keep me from choking him in a panic. "Relax, I've never let anyone fall yet." He was laughing softly.
"Laugh it up, Circus Boy." I grumbled. "What are we doing up here anyway?" The last line came out sort of as a squeak.
"It's a place I could see to teleport to, and a place I can see the lay of the land from." He swept an arm out in a great shadowy arc, I kept my death grip around his waist. "Do you know where you are now?" he asked.
Lizard should be here, Liz would love this. Another Elf who's at home in the treetops. I squinted and looked around. A lot of woods, some open farm fields shimmering in the light of a half moon, the glow of a few scattered houses. "Which one did we come from?"
"Over there, about two miles south. It's easier.."
"...to 'port north or south along the Earth's magnetic lines."
"Ach! What don't you know about me?"
"Your shoe size."
"I don't usually..."
"Yeah I know." He had pried my hand loose from his t-shirt and was holding me gently, loosely like a kitten. But I knew he'd catch me if I slipped. I had stopped shivering in fear and was actually beginning to like the view.
Shivering. He was shivering slightly. He was wearing half a t-shirt and jeans, and nothing else. We'd escaped one danger to be thrown headlong into another.
"You're cold." I said. "We need to get you someplace warm."
"Achja." He said softly. "But it's not like we can just walk into McDonald's or something."
"Yeah, no shirt, no shoes, no service." I gave his half a shirt a tug.
He let out a quiet laugh.
"We need to get back to Hawk Circle. You'll be safe there." I scanned the horizon for something familiar. Not far away a straggle of headlights made their way down the backroads, and a bit farther was the bright light of a major route. But it wasn't like we could just go out there and thumb a ride, either. Nightcrawler was not as easy to disguise as Legolas, he tended to have a strange effect on people who didn't know him. They'd either lynch him or run screaming into the night.
He was shivering a bit more now.
"Are you ok? I mean, Nazgul Barbie didn't hurt you, did she?"
"First a herd of mastodons, then some tyrannosaurs. I've had worse." He paused. "But I don't think I have many more teleports left in me tonight."
"Enough to get us out of this tree, I hope, I climb in exactly the way squirrels don't." A glow on the far horizon could be York, or Harrisburg, or Carlisle, or a half dozen other towns. The faint river of light to the west could be Route 83 or something else.
River. Those lights were moving like cars going over a bridge. A big one. One over the River. And the glow I was seeing was the lights on the cooling towers at Three Mile Island. "That's the river."
"Which one?"
"The Susquehanna."
"The one that runs from New York down to the Chesapeake Bay." he said through tight teeth.
"We're east of it. And that's Three Mile Island."
"THE Three Mile Island, the one Magneto tried to..."
"He doesn't exist in this world. Unless Nazgul Barbie takes a liking to him and yanks him out of his bath. We did have a little near-meltdown a few years ago, without the assistance of any evil mutants."
"So where is your Hawk Circle?"
"Ummmm...over there..." I pointed, "about twenty miles."
He made a soft exclamation under his breath.
Too far to bamf. I turned and my nose was buried in a mass of shadowy curls, he was looking away, off into that impossible cold distance. Knowing there was no safe haven between our tree and Hawk Circle. "A lighter and a cell phone would solve all our problems." I said.
He turned his head and nearly bumped noses with me. "You're brilliant." He smiled and those little catlike fangs glinted in the moonlight.
"So where are we gonna get something like that?"
The grin widened, like the Cheshire cat.

nelphae-ar-odog: Legolas
"There were many bridges over the river, and she hadn't chosen the most direct one to the other side. Tas thought she wanted the trail to look real, as if she had been trying to hide her tracks. Still, we found it. And followed it on the other side, now straighter and faster, with no more wrong turns, no more misleading offshoots. We came at last to a farmhouse, ancient for a house of this land, though it had existed for only a few lifetimes of Men." Legolas smiled, "You would have liked it, solid dark stone, sturdy and well-rooted. Good bones."
The Dwarf grinned in appreciation. "and what did you find there?"
"Nothing. Nothing but the remnants of magic. The house was empty, not even a plant or a cat, or a guardian dog. Shenzi sensed a faint odd smell. Zan, like all of us, could understand the dog's thought, "Like a science experiment gone horribly wrong." he described the smell. Like the breath of Smaug.
Tas sniffed. "Sulphurous. And there's a spell surrounding the house. Why is this house protected by an anti-teleport spell?"
"To keep you out?" Ian said.
"Watch." She vanished with a faint phoomph. A moment later the front door crashed open, and hung half off its hinges. "Teleporters check in but they can't check out." Her hair looked as if she'd been in a battle, and her face wore an expression one might find on the face of a Dwarf who's had his dinner interrupted by a horde of starving orcs. "Besides, Nazgul Barbie doesn't know about me."
"Hey, you're the only teleporter I know of outside the comics." Ian said.
Zan sniffed again. "comics..."
"Wait..." Ian said... "what?"
"I was already going around the house," Legolas continued, "listening to the faint whispers of sleeping shrubbery. So hard was I listening, I almost did not see the tracks."
"Elves." Gimli snorted."Where's a good Ranger when you need one."
"We had come in at the front porch, I had walked most of the way around the house before I found the side porch, four steps, and some strange footprints in the snow. They were the marks of bare feet. They looked almost human, but they had only two toes, and a strange projection in the back. Ian came up beside me and studied the marks too."
"Guys..." Zan said, he was fidgeting, and not with cold, but no one paid attention.
"There's where somebody hit the dirt," Ian said, "and one back there at the bottom of the steps. No blood though." He picked up some shattered bits of hard packed snow. "Looks like somebody had a snowball fight." He squinted at the tracks in the snow and called to Tas. "What Faery Folk would leave tracks like this? With two toes?"
"None I know of." Tas said.
"Guys, ah..."
Ian stared at the snow for awhile longer, eyes like owls' in the dark.
"The trail grows cold." I said. He caught my arm and pointed at a mark in the snow. "Uh, does that look like a...a...what is that?"
"The mark of a ...
"tail." Zan said in the exact same breath as me.
"This long," I held my hand to my chest, "with an arrowhead shape to the end." It looked familiar, but it did not belong there, in the snow of Penn's Woods.
"I keep trying to tell you..." Zan said.
Liz came up and stared at it with a look of total disbelief. "Ja." she said, and gave Ian a meaningful look.
He stared down at the tracks, looked at Zan.
"Duh!" Zan said, "if Nazgul Barbie could open a door to Middle-earth, what else could she open?"

Lorien
The little convenience store was at the edge of nowhere, and about a mile from our tree. It was easy to 'port into the darkness behind the dumpster, and wait for one of the late night employees to come out for a smoke and a chat with his girlfriend on his cell phone. Nighty was trying to hide the big shiver and failing. I pulled some cardboard out of the dumpster, it was warmer to stand on than icy concrete. Then I practically forced my coat on him. Nana got it a size too big (she always overestimates my pudge potential) and it actually just fit Nighty's lean, lithe build.
Yeah, well, he did look a little silly in that puke pink Nana favors.
In the puddle of amber light at the back of the store, a twenty-something with too many earrings was lighting up a cigarette with a cell phone sandwiched between his shoulder and ear. "Hey Babe, whassup?"
Bamf.
"I'll just be borrowing that for a second." Nighty whisked the phone off Earring Boy's shoulder and bowed with the flair of an aerialist who'd just completed a quadruple somersault.
Bamf.
Earring Boy stood staring into the shadows that had just briefly produced something from the deepest, most awful corner of his nightmares. His mouth stayed open for the minute it took to phone Liz's cell and tell where we were. It was still open when the vision reappeared in front of him, puke pink coat and all.
Bamf.
"Thanks. Oh, we'll keep the lighter, you really ought to give that up, you know."
Bamf.
The last I saw of him, he was still standing there, staring open-mouthed into the shadows.

nelphae-a-tolodh: Legolas
That's when Liz's cell phone went off. It was Lorien. She only had a minute, she said, she described where she would be; in a patch of woods not far from a certain convenience store. "Look for the fire." she told us. "And...I have a friend who helped me escape. Hurry!"
Ian nearly shouted into the phone, "What friend?" But the line was dead.

Lorien
Less than a mile away was a stretch of woods unbroken by field or house for a mile in either direction. We 'ported in to moonlit snow striped with treeshadow, and a scattering of evergreens behind. Nightcrawler peeled off my coat and thrust it at me. "You're shivering."
"I'm getting wood and you're still barefoot. Sit on it. Anyhow, I have a natural blubber layer."
He put it around my shoulders anyway, and swung up into the nearest tree. I noticed he wasn't moving as smoothly as before. I found some likely looking firewood, wishing Mountain Woman Liz was here. She'd at least know how to actually start a fire. I did an expedition into my pockets; the coat, the jeans, the grungey barn sweatshirt. There were some crumpled Kleenex and a note that would make decent tinder, I hoped. Nightcrawler used my knife to make some more out of a dry bit of wood; growing up in a gypsy circus had its advantages, like learning to start fires out of pretty much nothing. With the lighter it was easy. But by the time we had a blaze going, he was shaking. I cut a few evergreen boughs and made a bed of them by the fire. He perched on it, coiled into a shivering ball. I knelt by him and put the coat over him and pulled him close. "It's OK, Kurt, they'll find us, soon, I promise."
He didn't answer, just leaned his head on my shoulder. I looked down into a lion's mane the impossible color of evening sky over the Rockies. The first time we'd gone over them, I'd stood at 12,500 feet and stared up into an intense, deep, edge of space blue that could never be recreated with printing ink or paint or photography. The Great Big Blue Forever. Now that I could see Kurt in the light, he was that color, vibrant deep sky, endless deep sea, the light glancing off an indigo bunting's feathers. Or a hyacinth macaw.
Sehr schon. Very beautiful. Fair beyond the measure of Men. In the firelight, his cheekbones and jawline had the same chiseled beauty of Legolas'. Fuzzy Elf. He was elvishly light and lithe and agile, and, most of the time, elvishly light of heart too. Morathradon, one who walks the paths of night. Luindar. Blue Elf.
I hoped my directions had been clear enough for the gang, or we'd both be blue by morning.

nelphae-a-neder: Legolas
"Many times that night we wished for Bran to be among us, for he could circle and see farther than even I." Legolas said.
"You can tell a sparrow from a finch a league away, and I cannot tell them apart even in my own hand!" Gimli said.
"That is because sparrows are finches, and finches are sparrows, except that they are many different families, like the Avari and Sindar and Noldor and Laiquendi, yet all are Elves. Then there is the differences of ..."
"Legolas!"
The Elf paused in mid-breath, "What?"
"I did not ask for a dissertation on Elvish Biology."
Legolas sighed, and fell silent.
"Anyway, on the plains of Rohan, you counted Riders five leagues away, and told the color of their hair, the brightness of their spears, and the height of their leader."
"The Plains of Rohan were flat, and you could see to the edge of the round world."
"I still do not believe this round world business."
"Well, it is. And in Penn's Woods it is very round, every bit of the land is wrinkled and rounded like the quilt of a restless sleeper. Lorien's fire could have been a hundred strides away and yet been invisible, hidden in some fold of the land, or some gully. I set out on foot with Liz's cell phone and Shenzi, Liz set out with Zan and Kodi at a run, and Ian set out on Tas. Whichever found the fire first would call the other on the cell phones Ian and Zan, and now I, carried. I ran far, and climbed several trees. At last Shenzi stopped, nose in the air, scenting something. I crept forth and saw a flicker of light, in the hollow at the bottom of a wooded hill."
"Wait," said Gimli, "Did you not mention a store? She saw a store. She could have met you there, it would have been easier to find."
Legolas shook his head, "She had a good reason to stay hidden in the woods, and it had nothing to do with the captor she had escaped from."

Blueberry Muffin and the Errol Flynn Fan Club

Lorien
They came out of the woods like a dream, two dogs, a spotted horse, a rider, two hunting Elves, and Mountain Woman Lizard. "Legolas! Liz!" I tried to shout but my voice wasn't working, it came out as a whisper. Maybe I was out cold again, and hallucinating. Or the fire had gone out and I'd fallen asleep and was freezing to death. No, I couldn't, I had a superhero to protect. I glanced down, Nighty was snoring lightly in my lap, still huddled in that awful pink coat. At least he had stopped shivering. The fire was fine, still blazing cheerfully away. The only people who were blue were supposed to be. Kodi came over and sniffed the bundle of blue curls in my lap, then schlorked my face with a warm tongue. Shenzi stood just outside the circle of the fire, eyes gleaming like Nightcrawler's.
Legolas came up silently and knelt beside me, he lifted my chin and peered into my eyes. He looked relieved, then his hand dropped to Kurt's head. A blue-fuzzed tail uncoiled a notch and twitched in the middle of a dream. Legolas paused, hand still on Kurt's hair, his mouth opened to say something, and then the impossible happened.
An astonished Elf could not find any words to say.
Liz and Ian trotted up and stood staring.
Ian looked even more stunned than when Legolas had walked through the door in the Grandmothers' kitchen. "Zan..." he said very quietly, as if he was afraid he'd wake up and find it was a dream, "is this an illusion?"
Zan dropped beside me, poked a hand into the blue curls. Faint lightnings played around his fingertips. "Nope." He looked up, his face like a twelve-year-old's on Christmas morning. "I kept trying to tell you; the sulphurous smell, the two-toed tracks, the tail print, teleporters check in but they can't check out..." He stared in pure admiration.
Ian looked at Legolas, coiled like a gargoyle by Kurt, eyes impossibly wide. Ian's eyes shifted to the huddled, sleeping blue Elf, then to Legolas. His mouth tried to form a few words and failed. Legolas just nodded in empathy. Liz had the same expression on her face. Total, utter awe and astonishment.
Comic book geeks. Geeeeeeez.
Finally Liz knelt beside me and reached a slow hesitant hand out, as if she was afraid he'd vanish in a bamf of logic.
"Why the hell couldn't she have kidnapped me." she said at last.
Tas melted back into her elfshape. "He's a lot hotter than the comics draw him." she observed. "Except right now... he's kind of... cold... ah... here..." She peeled off the big indigo parka she'd just manifested and passed it to Ian. Under it she was wearing a second coat.
"Morathradon." Legolas whispered in his own tongue. "Our sorceress has opened another Gate."
"Uh huh." Liz's eyes were still as big as Asteroid M.
"Elves. Collect the set." I said.
Ian dropped on the other side and lifted off the awful pink coat, he slid Tas' over Nighty in its place. "He's asleep." He ran his hands gently over Nightcrawler. His eyebrows dropped, "But he's not in the best of shape. Hey." he said quietly, "Kurt..." he shook Nighty's shoulder gently.
Nightcrawler let out a startled gasp and sat up hard. I pictured him using his last teleport in a blind panic, I pictured him on the roof of McDonald's. I pictured firetrucks and ladders and helicopters and questions. I grabbed him and said, "Whoa, Nighty, it's the good guys!"
Nightcrawler's startled eyes took in two dogs and five strangers, all staring at him. They registered Legolas' bow, and Liz's bo, and the fact that none of the other strangers were wielding weapons. He noted that one of them was kneeling on his tail.
"Ow." He said.
Ian looked down, "Oh...crap! Sorry!" He flashed an apologetic smile. Then ran a hand down the part he'd just squooshed into the snow.
"Cool!" Liz said.
Even I could see the green glow that wavered around his hands.
"Heiler." Kurt whispered. "You're a healer."
"Yeah. Lemme see your head." Ian reached out both hands and framed Kurt's face, shadowy even in the firelight. Green light danced around the edges of Ian's hands like an aurora, like bioluminescence in the sea. He passed them over the rest of Kurt's body, then the light faded like a green sea wave vanishing into the sand.
"Unglaublich!"
Ian flashed a lopsided embarassed grin.
"You... you're a mutant too?" Nnightcrawler asked.
"No 'mutants' here. He's got a gift, though." Zan's voice came from the other side of the fire.
Nightcrawler pulled the indigo parka around him. His eyes took in the rest of the crew.
"The rest of them are the Elves I told you about." I said.
"You're a little taller than the Elves I met in Ireland." Kurt said.
"Those were leprechauns." Ian said, "You're talking about the Black Tom Cassidy incident, right?"
"Is that in the comic too?" he asked me.
"Ja." I said.
"I wonder what isn't in the comic." he said, looking a bit worried.
"Blueberry muffin." Tas was leaving eyetracks on him, parka or not.
Kurt's eyes widened, then shifted quickly to the fire. Good thing he was blue, the blush of embarrassment didn't show.
Ian gave Tas a swift poke in the ribs.
Tas' grin widened. "Maybe we could compare teleportation styles?" she said to Nighty.
Kurt looked up, "You're a teleporter too?"
"Yep."
"She's a pooka." added Zan.
"Was?"
"An Elf who can shapeshift." Tas said.
Something in Nighty's face shifted subtly, warily.
"Not like Mystique." Liz said quickly.
Yeah, it must be wunderbar having an evil mutant for a mom.
"Call me Tas." she added. "He's Ian, that's Zan, Liz, and..."
Nightcrawler nodded, with the flair of a performer's bow, to each in turn.
"...Legolas of Mirkwood." our Sindarin Elf said, with his own gallant bow.
Nighty bowed back, "I know of you from your tale."
Legolas' face registered surprise, then composed itself, "As I know of you from yours. I hear you are at home far above the ground, and can wield a sword well."
"Three of them at once." Liz added, sharing a conspiratory grin with me. Legolas had not yet seen the Nightcrawler mini-series we'd got him for Christmas.
Nightcrawler broke into a boyish grin, "I hear your archery skills would make Robin Hood look like a beginner."
"Who?" Legolas said.
"If you stay long enough, I will find that Robin Hood movie I enjoyed so much. The one with Errol Flynn."
Legolas nodded. "I know of him. Dana has the pirate movies, what was it? Captain Blood, and the Sea Hawks."
"Ahhhh, the best!" Nighty's face had the look of a twelve year old with a thousand bucks to spend at Toy 'R Us. "But you know, Basil Rathbone and Bob Anderson were the real swordsmen. It was Anderson who stunted for Flynn, and trained him. And most recently trained Viggo and Orli, and Johnny Depp..."
"Uh, I hate to interrupt this meeting of the Errol Flynn fan club, but you're both going to be stuck in this dimension until the end of Time As We Know It, unless we track down Nazgul Barbie before the trail gets too cold."
Surprise, it was Liz who had spoken.

canaphae: Legolas
"High Elves, dark Elves, grey Elves, green Elves, it seems your people come in every color! But I have never heard of any blue Elves." Gimli stared out at the sunlit sea, an impossible deep blue. He tried to imagine Legolas that color and failed. "Will there be any of those...most unusual folk in the Blessed Realm?" If there were, he wanted to meet one. He tried to imagine adding a tail which could grasp things to an already over-agile Elf. It boggled the mind. "And a tail!" Gimli exclaimed. "What a warrior that would make!" He pictured Legolas and his swift knives...and someone wielding three of them!
Legolas laughed. "No, I think there are no Luindar in Eressea. Morathradon...Kurtvagner came from a different...loop in the Stream of Time. He was of the race of Men, but one changed by..." his falcon-wing eyebrows folded as he searched for words that wouldn't bend Gimli's limited perception of the world too much...and failed. "...mutations in the genetic structure of his DNA."
"Ach!" Gimli exclaimed, "More of your incomprehensible Elvish Arts."
"Not Elvish, human. Science. They'd learned to see down into the tiniest parts of the universe and unravel its secrets. DNA is what gives you your magnificent beard, and me my far-seeing eyes."
"I thought that was our mothers."
"You get your mother's DNA, and your father's, and your grandparents' and..."
"Nevermind. I don't need to understand it. It's just too Elvish. Go on about the tale. And the Elf with the tail."

Miruvor and Lembas a la Keebler
Lorien
"We should go back to Hawk Circle, get some food and rest for our kidnapees." Ian said.
We'd just told the rest of the E.L.F. crew what had happened at Nazgul House.
"I'm fine." I said, standing. Just deadly thirsty, starving, and in dire need of a porta-bush.
Nightcrawler uncoiled partway, like a cobra preparing to strike. "I too, am fine."
"The trail grows colder and colder, and our quarry gains a lead with every slip of the moon across the sky." Legolas said.
"Do you have a plan?" Nightcrawler asked the Fellowship in general.
"The last thing she'll expect is for all of us to show up on her doorstep for a pajama party." Tas said, with a predatory smile. "Let's get 'er."
"Dude, yeah." Zan said.
"Bring on the orcs." Liz said. "Let's go kill something."
"What?" I said, appalled.
"It's our Dungeons and Dragons battle cry." she said.
"Barbarian."
"Vegetarian."
"Somebody call our Fearless Leader and let him know what's going on, we may need backup." Ian said. To Nightcrawler he said, "Aiwei. He's the one who coordinates big problems like rescue of endangered species, toxic waste spills, evil mutants and backed up toilets. And last I saw, he was trying to teach some bored ninth graders the wonders of recycling."
Nightcrawler cocked a questioning eyebrow.
"They were making Christmas gifts out of soda bottles."
"Oh."
Zan pulled his cell out of a pocket.
"And get Bird Boy too, while you're at it." Tas said.
Ian unslung the small pack he'd been carrying and passed a thermos to me, with a couple of cups. I opened it and the smell of the Grandmothers' hot chocolate wafted out. I passed Nighty a cup.
"You don't need much of that, it's like miruvor, it's the Grandmothers' special recipe." Ian dug farther into the pack and produced a water bottle, and more of those Keebler Elves.
"Cookies?" I said. Lembas, I could have used, but Keebler?
"They're not what they look like." Ian said. "More of the Grandmothers' good home cooking. It's easier to disguise this way."
"One small bite will fill the stomach of a full-grown Man." Zan intoned, in perfect imitation of Movie Legolas.
Nightcrawler snorked his chocolate through his nose. "I promise not to eat more than two!" he said. "I'm no Hobbit!"
"Wait, you have the movie in your universe too?" I said.
"Of course, banana brain," Liz said, "don't you remember all the references to Star Trek and Star Wars and stuff in X-Men?"
I looked at Nighty for confirmation. He nodded.
"Howcome you remember it the way it actually was?" Liz said.
"Was?"
"Here, everything got changed when Legolas was yanked through the portal. The whole story got turned upside down."
"It was OK last time I looked." Kurt said. "Little action figures and everything."
I looked at Legolas, then Ian, and Tas.
"The Stream of Time does not flow in all places the same." Legolas intoned.
"Oh." Liz said, looking kind of relieved.
"Yeah," I said, "but by the time Nighty gets back, I bet it'll be Darth Frodo all over the place."
Zan grinned, "Then they'll just have to send Luke Skycrawler out to face him."
I had a brief, awful vision of a blue guy in Luke's Tatooine desert garb wielding three lightsabers at once.
"Darth Frodo?" Nighty said.
Legolas looked confused.
"Don't ask," Liz said.
"She's the one who pulled Legolas out of his..." I could not say more due to the large Siberian fur mitten that had just been stuffed in my mouth.
"At least Nighty didn't get ripped out of Giant Issue One." Liz said. "I think."
"Yeah, I was re-reading the Draco story back at the barn," Zan said, "that one was still OK a few hours ago."
"Ah," Legolas said, "that is the one where we find out who his father..."
"What's the last thing you remember, Nightcrawler?" Ian said, one hand clapped firmly over Legolas' mouth, "Adventure-wise, I mean."
"A bunch of religious crazies in Montana." he said, face going shadowed and grim.
"Yeah, Holy War." Ian said, looking pointedly at Legolas, "a few issues before Draco. At least Nazgul Barbie hasn't wrecked forty years of comics continuity."
"What continuity? It looks like a frickin' baobab tree with all the storylines and alternate universes branching off." Zan said.
"At least they won't miss him much at the comics shop," Liz nodded at Nighty, "They'll just think he fell into another alternate universe again." She gave him a long look, as if contemplating the possibilities of not sending him back.
"Or that he decided to hang up the superhero thing and become a priest or a lawyer or something." Zan made a face.
Nightcrawler shot him a startled look.
Liz struck a defensive pose in front of Nighty, "Hey the priest thing was kind of..."
Dumb, really dumb, for a guy that sexy. What a waste of a perfectly good...
His eyes flicked to mine, and one eyebrow crept up. I wondered how much he had learned from those telepaths he lived with. I stared quickly into the fire.
"And shouldn't Evolution be De-volution?" Zan was saying, "I mean, they're all younger..."
"People..." Ian said, "PEOPLE! Somewhere there are millions of Tolkien fans who want the Sindarin Elf back where he belongs. And somewhere else, there are millions of X-Fans who are gonna eventually miss Fuzzy Elf here if we don't get him back too. So eat your Keebler Elves and get your butts in gear. We can do Comic-con later." He gave both Elves a wistful look, as if he'd rather we didn't find a way to return them either.
Tas took a few of the Keebler Elves herself, then backed off, a shadowy form on the other side of the fire. She wavered, like an image seen through the heat waves on hot asphalt, then the pinto horse stood there. Nighty glanced at her, his cup halfway to his mouth, and glugged the rest of his drink without missing a beat. Nothing he hadn't seen before. She melted again, and Tas was back, this time clad in black leather that looked a whole lot like an X-Man uniform, boots, gloves and everything.
And it didn't fit her at all.
This time Nightcrawler froze, cup hovering in midair.
"How's this?" Tas stood before him, posing like a fashion model. One who could kick Rogue's and Sauron's butts together.
"It doesn't fit." I said. I glanced at the feet. Like Grandmother Delphi's toe socks, only with two toes.
She unzipped it. "That's the idea." She stepped out of it and handed the bundle of black leather to Nighty. Underneath was another black leather creation that actually fit her. Really well, hugging every disgustingly perfect muscular curve. "Maybe you should put some warmer clothes on, if you're going to continue to fight evil today."
He stared at her in astonishment.
"Whoa, cool." Liz said. "Make me one."
"It's on order, it should be here in about five years." came Wolverine's voice from behind me. I turned to see Zan with an elvish grin on his face.
Nighty took the bundle, hesitantly, then glanced at Liz and me.
"Come on girls, it's hard to change when you're being drooled at." Tas said, and dragged us away. She caught up the pooka parka Nighty peeled off as she went by. When we'd got to the other side of the fire, she handed it to me. "Merry Christmas." She said. She eyed the fire, "Could use a little more fuel, something pink, maybe."

canaphae-a-min: Legolas
"Luinda, the Blue Elf, Kurtvagner, who went by another name, Nightcrawler in the common tongue, Morathradon in mine, one who walks the paths of night, but known as Fuzzy Elf to his closest friends, for his velvet skin..."
"You elvish types have far too many names, look at Strider, the wedding invitations went on for four pages!"
Legolas continued as if he hadn't heard. "Tas and Kurtvagner brought everyone back to the Windrider, parked on the nearest road. I went with Kurt, for I wanted to see how the bamf worked..."
"Bamf?" Gimli said, his face registering confusion. "What...is a bamf? It sounds like something short, furry, Hobbitish."
"It is a sound. The sound made by imploding air rushing to fill the vacuum left by his body as he teleports elsewhere."
"Elvish science, bah! Now you've lost me. Again."
"The bamf is made by the air rushing together to fill the space his body has just left." He raised his hands and clapped them together. "Like thunder filling the space left by lightning." Legolas raised a questioning eyebrow.
Gimli just shook his head.
Legolas sighed. "He vanishes, there is this sound, he reappears elsewhere. But he really doesn't make exactly that sound, it's only a word representing the sound used in the comic book. They draw it in the illustration when he vanishes."
Gimli sat back, a smile of enlightenment on his bearded face. "Ahhhhh. Illustrated stories, you spoke of those before. Now there's something you should have brought back with you. Along with a few of your ladies."
Legolas smiled knowingly.
"What?"
"Nothing." His face was pure innocence. His eyes wide grey pools of purity.
"What?" Gimli leaned forward, suppressing an urge to suspend his friend over the side, head down in the waves till he talked.
"You'll have to wait till Yule."

Lorien
We 'ported back to the Windrider, parked just off the twisty back road a quarter mile from our little patch of woods. Ian's healing abilities seemed to have restored Kurt well enough to 'port several of us, including Legolas, who locked arms with him with the exuberance of a kid on his first rollercoaster ride. Liz caught his other arm and they vanished in a cloud of fuschia smoke, trailing gleeful laughter.
Tas and I stood staring after them. "Bloody hell." she said.
"But you can do it yourself." I said.
"Be way more fun with blue velvet." She didn't look like she was thinking of teleporting either.

canaphae-a tad: Legolas
"Well, what was it like, this bamf?" The Dwarf leaned forward expectantly. "Was it as fine as swinging a well-balanced axe? As opening a tunnel into a rich new vein of rare minerals? As heady as a good ale?"
Legolas thought of trying to describe it; like winging your way down a mountain on a thin sliver of board at warp 10. Like galloping a fine horse across country full of ditches and hedges to leap. Like standing on the topmost topmast with the wind whipping in your face and the sea rolling beneath you. Ah, but those things would mean little to Gimli, or only mean annoyance and terror, so Legolas simply answered; "Yes."

Dungeons and Dragons and Really Big Rats
Lorien
"Whoa, that was soooo cool!" Liz sounded like a terminal fangirl. Legolas was grinning from ear to pointy little ear.
Liz didn't even need a barf bag, blast her.
We piled into Tas' SUV, Windrider, and I do mean piled. Crammed. Stuffed. Like too much laundry in too small a suitcase.
"Ow!" Nighty said.
"Oh...sorry about the tail." Legolas answered.
At least I got stuck between the Elves.
Fifteen minutes later we were a few hundred yards from the house, hidden behind a rise of ground and a patch of woods. We parked the SUV, and Zan touched the hood. Small lightnings played around the edges of his hands.
And the Windrider vanished. Standing in its place was a large, snow-covered rock.
"Nice special effects." Nighty said.
Zan bowed with the flair of an acrobat who's just done a quadruple somersault.
Legolas poked the rock with the bow he was now carrying. It emitted a dull thunk, just like a rock. He glanced at Zan. "I can think of a few more uses for a skill like that."
"I could show you..." Zan began.
"No." Ian said flatly, "No no nononono. Middle-earth is already gonna get weird enough."
Tas grabbed Ian's shoulder, turning him around, "Get on." she said, and melted into a horse. Nighty caught my hand and Liz's and the world turned inside out.
We bamfed into the treeline at the edge of the yard. A carefully landscaped yard surrounding one of those great ivy-covered old stone farmhouses. The kind people built two hundred years ago from the rocks in their fields, and pay about half a million bucks to live in now. The house was lit by a few pale interior lights, the kind people leave on when they're not there. And the front door was blown off.
"Wow, what happened there?" I said.
"Tas happened." Ian said, swinging off behind Legolas. She vanished again with a faint phoomph.
I eyed the door, a bright red splat in the snow a good fifty feet from the house. "Glad she's on our side."
A minute later she reappeared, in elfshape this time, with Zan and the dogs.
"I hear nothing." Legolas whispered. "I sense nothing in the house, do you?" he turned to Tas.
She shook her head, glanced at Kodi and Shenzi. "Neither do they."
"What now? Do we split up or stay together?" Liz said.
"Fearless Leader would have us scouting the whole flamin' place for the next hour before we made a move." Tas said sourly. Then she strode into the yard.
"Wait!" Ian caught her arm.
Tas' arm moved with the subtle grace of a fencing foil and Ian stood empty-handed, "...and Fearless Leader isn't here." she said. "Let's go kill something."
"Wait liebling," Nightcrawler leapt, catlike, in front of her, catching her hand with Errol Flynn grace. He raised her hand to his lips, then, "We should go together, I might need protecting."
She paused in mid-stride, her Wolverine glare turning to an amused smile. She closed her hand on his and waltzed across the yard.
Ian stood staring after them.
Legolas came up beside him. "Maybe you should take notes." he said. "Or have Zan make you a tail."
"It's the blue velvet thing, actually." Liz said, staring after Nightcrawler's retreating butt. Legolas stopped beside her, studying her. She gave him an embarrassed smile.
"Blue velvet." He said, his gaze turning to Nightcrawler and Tas. A small wicked smile crept across his lips, his eyes narrowed in contemplation. "Our ladies weave some excellent, form-fitting..." He turned to catch Liz's sudden look of astonishment, he blinked and his face became a mask of virtuous chivalry. "Ahhh, I'll have to remember that."
We moved toward the missing door, the faint yellow of the nightlight making the hall look like a candlelit dungeon. "Hear anything, Legolas?" Ian whispered.
His loaded bow was in his hand. "No. The house seems empty. But she has shown great magic, I do not trust this...it feels..."
"Yeah, listen to the Elf," Liz said, "nobody did in the movie, and look what happened. Every time he said, 'we should go now', nobody listened, and blammo! all hell'd break loose."
"Ja." Nighty agreed. "Listen to the Elf."
We spread out moving down the hall like one of Liz's D&D teams; stealthily, eyes moving in all directions, ears tuned to the smallest rustle, bow and bo at the ready. Ian had brought a small backpack with him, from it he produced several silver disks. One appeared to have once been a hubcap. Another looked precisely like a Volkswagon logo. Another may once have been a potlid. I cocked a questioning eyebrow.
He smiled and those green lightnings played around the edges of one disk.
The four doors opening off the hall were closed now.
"Nazgul Barbie must have come back in the house after she woke up." I whispered to Liz.
"Well, duh, Nightwear Barbie would get real far in the snow." she said.
"Somebody listen to this door." Ian said, "Somebody with Elf-ears."
Tas walked forward and struck it with the flat of her hand. It blew open, and sent a shower of china off a kitchen shelf onto the floor.
"What happened to elvish stealth and subtlety?" Nightcrawler said.
Tas grinned at him and strode into the room. Legolas slid in behind her, sweeping the vast, dim space with his eyes. High on a wall, something screeched and fell with a crash and an arrow square through the middle.
"Smooth move, Bow Boy, you've slain a clock." Tas said.
Legolas shot her a look that would have fried her, had he Cyclops' force-beam eyeballs.
"Why would Nazgul Barbie have one of those clocks with the bird calls on them?" I asked, picking it up.
"Yeah, I'd expect something more like the soundtrack from Scream 3, or Psycho." Liz said.
"I think," Nightcrawler said, "judging by the look in her eyes when I first appeared in her basement, it should be the theme from 'Jaws'."
The kitchen was empty of anything other than food and expensive china and sleek Death Star cupboards and appliances. Not even Shenzi or Kodi could find anything interesting. We moved back into the hall, where Nightcrawler and Ian were standing guard. Another door hung, dark and silent, across from the kitchen. Legolas slid past Tas and leaned his ear against it. He straightened and opened it with a faint click, he slipped into the room, loaded arrow pointing the way.
A couch, some chairs, a big-screen TV in the center of the entertainment center to end all entertainment centers.
"Whooooooa." Zan whistled. He ran a finger down the stack of DVDs, then poked at buttons on the wall of electronics. Something blinked and went zzzzzst. Tas grabbed him and dragged him off.
I looked around. Abstract art on the walls. A few sculptures that looked like something Darth Vader would do on his day off. Everything in black and steel. Deep white carpet gleaming like snow in the light coming through the window.
Light through the window. It was not moonlight, but faint, indigo morning.
"I am going to be soooo grounded." I said to Zan.
"The fate of two universes hangs in your hands, and you're worried about being grounded?" Liz said. "Anyway, I think that's Dana's department. Professor Dana Xavier. Our moms will end up thinking we were helping out at a Christmas charity for homeless gerbils or something." She paused, frowning, "Is that what I think it is?"
The palawntir glittered darkly from its place on a perfectly polished mahogany endtable.
Zan stalked up to it, held a hand over it, not quite touching. "Doesn't quite match the expensive decor."
It was a deep red glass ball, the kind you could find at Wal-Mart for about ten bucks.
Tas reached for it. Zan snatched out out of her reach. "I think maybe we should take this with us."
"Whatever you say, Pippin." she answered, one fist clenching and unclenching, as if she wished the ball was in her grip, in pieces. "Wouldn't look in it too closely if I was you, though."
Zan threw her a smile, whisked off the handwoven cloth covering the end table, wrapped the ball in it and dropped it in his pack.
The next room was a library, ceiling to floor bookshelves of dark polished wood. Ancient looking, enameled boxes, chests with weird runes and hieroglyphs carved on them. "Bingo." I said. I pulled some of the titles, all of them in my section had something to do with magic.
"Hey." Liz said from the other side of the room, "She's got Lord of the Rings."
I turned to see her rustling through the pages. She looked up in surprise, "Her's isn't changed."
"Yeah, Sphere of Influence." I said. "She made the spell, makes sense it wouldn't affect any of her stuff either."
Liz tucked it under her arm and poked through a few more shelves.
"What are we looking for exactly?" Zan said.
"The counterspell comes to mind." Ian said.
Zan eyed the walls of books. "That ought to be real simple."
"Perhaps we should check these out of the library to peruse at our convenience?" Tas said.
"Yeah, like how?" Zan said.
Tas grinned, wider than Shenzi and strode across the room to the window. She whipped back the layers of carefully arranged brocade draperies. A leg flashed out and the window flew into the yard in a billion pieces. Tas gave us a cheery wave and stepped through it into the snow. I heard a distinct phoomph and she was gone, her tracks in the snow ending just outside the no-teleport zone. A moment later there was an enormous PHOOMPH! and a large rock squatted in the lawn, just outside the window, Tas swaying on the top like a bullrider. Behind the rock, a wake of snow, plowed by some large moving object, skewed randomly through the yard.
"Zan!" Tas yelled, leaping down, "Get this damn illusion off this thing so I can see to drive!"
Zan leapt out the window like Peter Pan heading for Neverland and touched the rock...the Windrider sat there, tailgate to the window. Tas smacked the tailgate open and swung back over the window ledge. She stood in front of the bookshelves. "Which ones do you want?"
Ian began pulling things out and loading them into her arms, she tossed them out the window into the depths of the SUV, a grin on her face like a kid on Christmas morning.
"Hey." Liz said, from the other side of the room. "HEY! She's got X-Men...the whole freakin' thing from 1963 on! In mint!"
Ian, bounded across the room and caught her shoulder. He pulled her aside so he could see Giant Sized Issue One, "Damn! That thing's worth, like over $6000!"
"Why would Nazgul Barbie have X-Men?" Zan said.
Ian flipped through the pile Liz was rapidly pulling off the shelf.
Nightcrawler came in out of the hall and peered over Ian's shoulder. He made a small sound of dismay.
"Here." Liz said, thrusting a different comic under his nose, "You look better in this one."
"She's a fangirl." I said. Everyone in the room turned to look at me. "Why else would she pull both these guys out of their own universes."
"I dunno, I was thinking maybe her plan was like, oh, world domination or something." Zan said. "Isn't it usually?"
"If that's what she wanted, she would have pulled Sauron and Magneto. I don't think you'd get very far with Legolas and Nightcrawler." Tas said, with an apologetic nod to them. "But then Sauron is far from hot." She gave Legolas the look Shenzi usually reserves for squirrels who have entered her play yard. Yummy squirrels. Her gaze lingered over Nightcrawler and her smile widened.
"Books." Nightcrawler said, backing up a step, "You were checking out books."
She grinned and stepped past him to the shelves, trailing a finger across his pooka-leather covered chest. She grabbed a few more volumes off the nearest shelf and winged them out the window with the flair and accuracy of Gambit winging the ace of spades, or Gimli throwing an axe. They landed in the Windrider with a satisfying thud.

The Windrider was full and the shelves bare of anything that resembled magic. Tas vanished out the window again and I heard the big PHOOMPH! of the SUV returning to its parking space. A few heartbeats later there was a faint displacement of air just north of Nighty's shoulderblades.
"Ach!" Startled, he spun quick as a cat, hands moving to strike, tail already moving toward his attacker's neck.
From mid-air, Tas landed on her toes, hands sweeping his hands and tail up in a neat block. She held him for just a little longer than I thought was really necessary, one thumb moving across the velvet of his tail.
Ian grinned, "Isn't that usually your favorite move, Nightcrawler?" Bamfing in from above and behind, he meant.
"Ehhh." Nighty said, "Obviously it works." He extracted his tail from Tas' grip and went to the door to the hall.
Legolas stared after him, "I have to remember that."
"You can't teleport." I said. Then considered how little we actually knew about the Prince of Mirkwood. "Can you?"
He smiled, "One does not always need magic to surprise an enemy."
"Come on." Ian said, "We still have one more room to check, and that's just downstairs. There's a whole 'nother floor upstairs."
"And the basement." I said, with distaste.
We piled out of the door. Nightcrawler stood guard in the hall with Ian and the dogs. Legolas pasted his ear to the next door only to have it blow out from under him as Tas shoved it open.
Little fish danced across the computer screensaver, with an occasional bubbling noise. The rest of the room was quiet and still, a tidy, tasteful collection of computer gear and filing cabinets.
"Whoa! This is even better than her entertainment center!" Zan sat in the chair, staring at the screen.
From his place by the door, Ian crossed the room in two strides and grabbed him out of the chair, pulling him back from the computer as if it was the fire of Isengard itself.
"Oh yeah, booby-trapped fish." Liz said.
"No, no, no, you don't..." Ian threw out an arm to block Legolas as he came up behind him..."understand Elves and computers. Something about them, the energy they channel, just fries everything, eventually. There may be info on there we need."
Zan and Legolas retreated reluctantly to the far side of the room with Tas. Ian sat in the chair, poked uncertainly at a few keys, then looked over his shoulder at Liz and me. "Uh, I'm an artist, I have no left brain. Computers give me a headache. Are any of you guys...?"
"Lorien's the total computer geek." Liz said. "Check with Nightcrawler too. He once rigged a portable costumer out of ductape and bubble gum when he and Kitty were trapped on an alien spaceship."
"Oh yeah. I remember that." Ian said. "Hey, 'Crawler, come take a look at this."
The blue Elf came in and perched on Nazgul Barbie's peculiar ergonomic chair, tail twitching against the perfect dawn grey carpet. Liz leaned closer to look.
"OW!" Nighty said through his teeth.
"Oh," Liz said, "sorry about the tail."
"The rest of us should go back and make sure the basement and upstairs is clear." Ian said. "Tas'll come for you if anything goes wrong."
Nightcrawler nodded and wiggled the mouse. Click. Click. Click. The yellow eyes narrowed, like a hunting leopard's in the growing light from outside, a fanged smile gleamed out of his shadowed face.
I was really really glad he was on our side.
He frowned. Eased off the chair and gestured to it with a performer's flourish, eyes on me.
"Huh?" I said.
He held up his hands; each containing two oversized fingers and one extra-large thumb. An embarrassed smile played across his face. "Typing is not one of my superpowers."
"Oh." Duh. I wriggled into the weird chair (you sort of knelt on it), and crouched, hands poised over the keyboard. He leaned close, staring at the screen, his body smelling deliciously of campfire smoke. He shifted and I could see every muscle under the black pooka leather X-suit. I stared at the keyboard...and one chiseled blue hand, all the little details of vein and tendon visible under the fine blue velvet. Like on a horse's face. Only they're not blue. Or as hot.
"Lorien?"
"Oh! Uh...where do we start?"

canaphae-a-nel: Legolas
Legolas stretched languidly, like a cat, body sprawled comfortably in the ship's rigging, as at home there as an acrobat on a trapeze. Below him Gimli drained the last of an enormous mug, and wedged himself against the fiferail at the base of the mizzenmast, sturdy and immoveable as he. "We climbed the steps to the upper story," Legolas continued, "and found much the same as below; an empty house, a few well-kept bedrooms, one of their bathrooms. Back down the stairs again to the basement which Lorien and Kurtvagner had been prisoner in. The others could detect the strong scent of recent, powerful magic. And when we opened the door we found other...things."
"What? Orcs? A dragon?"
"Rats."
"A few terriers would have taken care of that problem."
Legolas grinned a grim grin, "They would have had to be very large terriers."

Lorien
"What was that noise?" I said.
"Either Nazgul Barbie has also found a way to pull Banshee into this world, or someone has found the giant black snake." Nightcrawler replied, eyes still fixed on the computer screen.
"You think they need help?"
"What was that line in Two Towers? When Legolas got the horse. The Elvish Way With All Good Beasts? I think they can handle it." He chucked a blank CD into the drive and began downloading.

canaphae-a-canad: Legolas
"The dogs stopped at the door and wouldn't come down the stairs." Legolas continued. "We left them as rear guard and went into the basement. There was only pale light from the missing door behind us until Zan raised his hand and a bird in glowing white sprang forth from it. We saw a bench, storage shelves full of glass and pottery jars, a few skulls, bones, feathers, a cauldron, tires, leftover bits of plywood, candles, a broom, a table. Lying along the wall was a pile of shadowy debris, the sort of thing that collects in basements, old, used things that no-one has fixed."
"They just let things lie about without fixing them?" the Dwarf was incredulous. "What a waste!"
"Perhaps they needed a few more busy Dwarves."
I moved toward the shadowed pile by the wall. Behind me Zan' illusory bird wheeled across the broad beams holding up the floor above us. The birdlight flickered in the tangled shadows, making them seem alive. Small rustlings sounded along the walls, and in the dark corners. The bird wheeled and flashed suddenly, as bright as Gandalf's fireworks. There was a sound like thunder and lightning, and the room went dark.
"What the hell?" Ian said.
"Ooops." came a small voice from the stairs."Oh crap." I turned to see faint lightnings crackling by the stairs. "A bit not good...a lot not good...really really really not good." The lightnings vanished and Zan's voice came out of the dark again, tinged with uncertainty and embarrassement. "Uh, there's like, a lotta magical debris here. Lots of it."
"Which means?" Liz said.
"Doing magic here is like trying to kayak a storm-swollen river full of strainers. Something short-circuited my spell. Wait..."
Light flared again, and I could see. Zan's flashlight played across the pile of debris.
...and it moved. It raised a head as broad as your axe, it only lifted a small part of its body from the ground, yet it was as tall as I. It was a great snake, like the kind I had seen on Discoverychannel, the kind that lived far, far to the south of Penn's Woods. It was black as the gates of Mordor. And hungry.
Gimli leaned forward, trying to imagine his friend's next tactic."Too close for a good bow shot, but I would not like to see you face that with only your knives."
Legolas smiled, and the smile widened, like a cat about to leap on a bird. "Not too close for this bow. It was made to stop a great buffalo, from an arm's length away."

Lorien
"Wait, " I said, "There...there. That one." I pointed to the screen, and Kurt nodded.
Click, save.
From somewhere in the basement came a muffled thump. I glanced at Nightcrawler. One pointy blue ear twitched slightly. "How about this one?" He pointed to the screen.
"Ja." I said.
From the basement came the distinct sound of an explosion.
"Ach mist!" he said, eyes never leaving the screen. "I'm missing all the fun."

canaphae-ar-leben: Legolas
My bow sang, the arrow buried itself in the head of the great snake. It was no natural creature, but one twisted and corrupted and grown to immense size by the wild dark magics now loose in that place. There are other things that haunt dark basements; rats, spiders, centipedes, millipedes. They poured out of the cracks in the walls, great wriggling things born of the morgul debris.
Ian reached behind his shoulders and drew from his pack a few circles of silver and steel. Two were hubcaps, from cars, one a pot lid, one was small, with strange runes upon it; a V and a W in a circle of silver. Others were CDs whose rainbows no longer sang. He threw them like frisbees and where they hit, the creature of the dark vanished in a flash of flame, or roiling smoke. They struck like falcons, swift and sure, always returning to his hand.
Zan stood on the steps trying to direct the one flashlight onto too many foes. The floor crawled with rippling, scuttling forms. I heard his voice rise in fear, then fall into the rythm of a spell. Silver light burst forth again, this time in the form of small dragons. They swooped on rat or spider or thousand legged creeper with deadly ferocity, flames bursting from their jaws. And their jaws were not mere illusions, they could bite with the savagery of wargs.
"Hey!" Ian shouted, ducking, "watch where you're flying those things!"
"Dammit Jim, I'm an illusionist, not a starship pilot!" Zan snapped back, in the voice of the starship Enterprise's Doctor McCoy.
Liz stood back to back with me, her bo staff whirling and thrusting through the dark twisted shapes. She moved like my shadow, never leaving an opening to my back for even the smallest, quickest foe. Barely I avoided the jaws of things a Man might have stepped on without notice, when they were their normal size.
"Legolas! To your left!"
My bow sang and Liz's bo struck.
"Liz, there!" Fast she was, faster than any of the Edain I had ever fought beside. And not even the great centipedes with their poisonous bites and thousand spidery legs made her blanch.
Ian's frisbees whistled through the air, sweeping in mad arcs, often too close for ease of heart. One sliced through my braid, shortening it to my shoulders. But several times those swift silver circles slew something that was leaping for my throat.
My quiver was soon spent, and there was no time to glean arrows. I drew the knives Dana had gifted me with. They were fair knives and did their work well.
"Legolas, catch!" One of my arrows flew toward me. Liz had caught a spent arrow with the end of her bo, and flicked it to my hand. I caught it and sent it into the heart of a giant rat. She leapt and spun, ever at my back, in one motion stabbing a foe and catching more of my arrows and sending them my way.
A few strides away, Tas had vanished, melted into wolf form, snarling and snapping her way through the horde. Arrows and silver circles and dragons filled the air like hunting hawks, Liz and Tas punched through the horde like hunting wolves. Our foes fell like leaves in a windstorm.
Silence fell.
"The bug stops here." Liz said, squashing a yet-wriggling centipede.
We stood in the glow of one of Zan's dragons, the floor littered with chitinous shells and too many spidery legs.
"Lorien failed to mention the pest control problem." Tas said, giving a twitching form a final kick with a booted foot.
"I think these weren't here then." Zan said. His voice had an edge of embarrassment to it. "Remember what I said about the strainers?"
"Yeah?" Ian said.
"Uh, what happens when you hit one?"
"Yeah...?"
"Ja picture this." he said, the voice was familiar, one I had heard somewhere on Cartoon Network, though I could not remember who it belonged to. "Bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-splat. My first spell cut something loose...kinda' like a big magical fart." Zan said. "Maybe I shoulda' stuck with the flashlight."

Lorien
Footsteps sounded in the hall and Kodi and Shenzi came through the door of the computer room. The rest followed. Tas' two-toned hair looked like an exploded Twinkie, and there was some kind of gooey schmuck plastered all over her. Ian's hair looked singed and Zan looked guilty. Zan's red hair looked like an electrocuted sea urchin, and Legolas' braid had come undone and half of it was missing. Ian shot him an apologetic look, and stuffed something into his pack. It looked suspiciously like a Volkswagen hood ornament.
Nightcrawler gave them the once over, "You found the ten-foot snake?"
"Thirty feet." Legolas said.
"And a few of his friends." Tas said, ineffectually swiping at some of the goo. "I'm gonna step on every millipede I see after this."
"Millipedes?" Nighty said, "What millipedes?"
Tas spread her hands as far as she could reach. "Millions of millipedes. Big, evil, hungry ones."
"Morgul millipedes." Legolas added, and flicked something off his quiver. It looked a lot like a bent stick.
Or a giant antenna.
"Unglaublich! There was nothing like that there when we were held prisoner."
"How about spiders?" Liz said.
"And the rats." Zan said..
"Ja, the rats, but they didn't come near us." He glanced at me, "Not too near, anyway." He smiled a pointy-toothed smile, his tail swooshed once, past his shoulders, "Sometimes it helps to be scary looking."
"You find anything?" Ian said to us.
I held up half a dozen CDs. "Some likely looking stuff here on magic."
"We got almost her whole hard drive." Nighty added, "And there's a box of burned CDs over there we can, ah, borrow."
Tas was staring out the door, "The big question, is where is Barbie now?"
"We really should go now." Legolas said.
"Listen to the Elf." Liz said.
"There are still some files here we should download." I said.
"I got a baaaad feeling about this." came Han Solo's voice from the back of the room. I turned to see Zan staring down the hall.
"We've got a superhero Fellowship here that could probably kick Magneto's butt, now's our chance to nab her." I said, eyes still glued to the screen.
"You didn't have a four foot centipede try to play Alien Resurrection with you." Liz quipped.
"Yeah, we need some reinforcements," Ian said.
"Ja...listen to the Elf." Nighty said, rising with the fluid grace of a hunting heron.
"Hey, where're the dogs?" I asked.
"Is that a car?" Tas' voice came from the hall.

Who's Been Eating My Porridge?
Lorien
"What...have...you...rejects from Bilbo's Birthday Party List...done to my house!" She stood in the space left by Tas' hasty removal of the front door, a dark shape framed by the growing blue dawn of the day before Christmas Eve. The door to the kitchen hung open...and slightly crooked. China littered the floor. From somewhere behind me drifted the acrid scent of a computer that had just self destructed.
With a little help from Legolas. What Ian had said about Elves and computers...oh yeah...it made the bamf look and smell like fresh coffee. Leggy stood facing our foe, shoulder-length hair a dark tangled mess, perfect cheekbones thoroughly smudged. His bow was in his hand, and loaded. The rest of us were crammed in the hall behind him, except for Nightcrawler who'd bamfed off into the shadows somewhere.
Nazgul Barbie was not pleased. She looked, in fact, rather like a hyena who's just had the Kill of the Week stolen by lions.
Liz poked me hard in the back. "I said 'listen to the elf', but does anyone ever? Noooo..."
Legolas drew the bowstring a notch tighter. Liz, pasted to his side, leveled her bo.
Nazgul Barbie raised her hand, made a small, insignificant gesture, Liz and Leggy froze, as if Professor X himself had done the trick. "And you, in the back, don't even imagine it. There's enough broken china in here without frisbees.
Ian stopped in mid-throw, three silver circles spread among the fingers of one hand.
I glanced back, Tas was frozen in mid-snarl. Zan was still moving, the little lightnings playing around the edges of his hands.
Nazgul Barbie watched him for a few breaths, a look of growing amusement on her face. "Go ahead." she said. "Try it." Her own hand glowed now like a special effect, and her smile spread with the dark, wicked light. "Make my day."
"You coulda' come up with a more original line." Zan said.
"You're off the edge of the map now. Here there be monsters."
"That's not original."
Her hand glowed the color of pain, and it spread in slow motion toward him. He stared at it, like a deer at an oncoming semi. It hit him like a bad dream, and he staggered back with a gasp.
His hand fell, and the lightnings vanished.
Her smile spread and then vanished behind a cloud of fuschia sulpherous smoke.
Bamf.
A pair of feet clad in pooka leather hit Nazgul Barbie square in the head.
"Now would be a good time to go!" 'Crawler said, crouched with one foot splayed across her face. The others unfroze.
"She's out!" Zan said, straightening with a grimace, red hair looking like he'd survived an explosion.
"Anybody bring any duct tape?"
"What?" Tas said.
"Was?" Nightcrawler said.
"Wrap her up and take her with us like some kinda' present?" Ian said.
"Yeah." Zan said.
"She's not entirely out." Nightcrawler hissed. "MOVE!"
Legolas leveled his bow.
"That's not going to do much, unless you kill her." Tas said, baring teeth.
"NO!" Nightcrawler said.
"It's kind of illegal." Liz added, planting her bo on Barbie's solar plexus.
From somewhere Zan had produced a length of rope. "Never know when you might need a bit of rope." he said in Sean Astin's Hobbit voice.
"Human laws." Tas said, licking her lips. She melted, and a red wolf stood glaring toothily down into Barbie's face.
Nightcrawler grabbed the thick fur at the back of her neck and heaved her aside. His foot never left Barbie's forehead.
Barbie moved, touched Nighty's foot with a hand.
He screamed and fell against the wall.
Three arrows stapled Barbie's sleeve to the same stretch of wall.
Ian flung his disks.
Barbie flung out her free hand.
The disks skipped as if they had hit a deflector shield. Ian ducked a bolt of green fire that blasted down the hall and carved a new door in the other end.
She yanked uselessly at her stapled sleeve, and four more arrows stapled more of her clothing to the wall.
"That's it, you Sherwood Forest reject." she said through her teeth, and Legolas' bow and the arrows holding her to the wall erupted into flame.
Liz rolled up off the floor, bo in hand, then crouched protectively over Nightcrawler. Tas reached out a hand to each one of them, and they vanished with a faint phoomph.
The house melted around us, and suddenly we were in the middle of...
...an episode of Crocodile Hunter? Something dark and slithery wriggled toward Nazgul Barbie's leg, while Steve Irwin ran silly, distracting commentary in front of a camera crew.
"...and over here we have the incredibly deadly and overly ugly Lesser Blonde Swamp Wriggler...ooooh that black snake is in trouble if it bites her!"
"That's...not...funny." Barbie screeched. The snake exploded, Steve and the crew vanished, and Barbie stood, hair smoking out in every direction, lightnings the color of a bruise crackling like an aura around her.
Zan faced her, wide-eyed, red hair falling over his face like an Anime hero...
...and we were on the bridge of the Enterprise. Professor Xavier, clad in a Starfleet uniform, stood up and shouted "Engage!" Control panels were blowing up and the crew was being tossed around, despite the artificial gravity which should have held them like a fly in amber. Liz appeared and leveled a phaser at Barbie. The energy beam hit her and flowed around her as if she had her own personal deflector shield. Worf the Klingon charged across the burning bridge and hit Barbie in the head with a huge spikey thing that only Liz would have known the name of.
...and it splintered into a thousand shining fragments, like a planet blowing up. Worf fell hard, warped, twisted and resolved into an extremely annoyed Tas. The starship vanished. Nazgul Barbie looked really peeved.
Zan was beginning to look really scared.
A hiking booted foot knocked Barbie off balance. Legolas came down out of a spinning kick and threw a hand out to finish her off.
He missed.
He missed!
Without looking, Barbie flung green fire at him.
...and he fell over the side of a pirate ship. Not just any old Pirate Ship, the Black Pearl herself, with cannon fire screaming through the rigging, and zombie pirates closing in on all sides, the light of a full moon shining on their bones and shreds of flesh. Only this time the cursed crew was convinced Nazgul Barbie was the one with the cure. They clattered toward her, hissing like a wind from hell. Ian threw a rope over the side, and Legolas reappeared, dripping.
He looked around, mouth hanging open in amazement. Then he broke into a grin.
"Cool!" the Prince of Mirkwood said.
"Liz!" I said, "If I pick up The Book, and he says 'cool!' I am going to come over in the dark of night and paint your truck puke pink! To match your walls! And your new haircolor!"
Barbie raised a hand, lightning flickered. The tidy order of the attack broke into chaos, cutlasses flashing around us like a storm gone mad. A couple of pirates were hacking at Ian, who was countering with swift kicks and blocks with his frisbees. Zan took refuge among the flying jibs at the bow of the great ship, swinging up out of the way of the pirates and focusing his spell. Tas charged barehanded into a tangled knot of pirates heading for Zan.
"How many times did he see that movie?" I yelled at Liz. I think Legolas still had Liz's DVD.
A particularly big, nasty looking pile of bones and shredded flesh swung a cutlass into the center of Liz's bo, and hacked it in half. Liz snarled and rammed the broken end through its eyesocket. She rolled and came up with a cutlass in her hand, sweeping it across the necks of three pirates at once. Bony heads clattered to the deck and vanished.
I ducked as a pirate swung hard at my head. "Well?" I demanded. A cutlass clanged to the deck beside me and I hefted it. It felt solid and real enough.
"Um." she said.
"Avast!" Legolas yelled and sliced a pirate in twain.
"Is he wielding a cutlass!?" I said. I looked. He was wielding two.
"Well, the bow..." clash clash, " IF he still had it, wouldn't be much..." hack, slice, "use here now..." slash, hack, "would it? Kinda looks like Orlando Bloom, doesn't he?" Swash, buckle, "Especially with the..." buckle, swash, "short, dark hair and smudges."
"I was thinking..." slash, hack, "Errol Flynn."
"Only hotter." Liz agreed, kicking something small and monkeyish over the ship's gunnels. "And nicer. Flynn was a bit of a..." smash, slash..."jerk, I hear."
Tas barreled up the deck, kicking zombie pirates over the side, starboard and port. As if her superpower was Attract Zombies, they began to gravitate toward her. Flow toward her, like sharks on a bleeding fish. In a moment she was vanishing under a pile of pirates, with one or two occasionally taking flying lessons.
Ian was backed up against a windlass, trying to wrench the head off a pirate whose bony hands were locked around his throat. Liz had hacked loose one of the mainmast shrouds, and was flying through the air towards him like a circus acrobat, dozens of swords and bony arms reaching for her.
And wherethehell was Nightcrawler? Out cold? Fried? What had Barbie done to him? Where had Tas left him? I thought of the miniseries cover with him swinging through the rigging of a pirate ship; he was really going to be sorry he missed this.
I got a glimpse of Zan, face grim with concentration as he tried desperately to regain control of his spell. High on the quarterdeck, Barbie stood, clad in outrageous swashbuckling garb...all bright Barbiedoll pink. Her hands flashed with lightnings as she strove with Zan to control the pirates. She laughed maniacally, and made a few delighted little hops when Ian's pirate dropped him to his knees.
Legolas leapt catlike onto the ship's gunnels and ran towards Ian.
About a dozen pirates reached for him...
...and didn't miss. He vanished, like a ship going to the bottom.
Liz swung down from her perch on a yard and hacked Ian's pirate into several sharkbite-size chunks. He gasped, and struggled to his feet, then grabbed a dropped cutlass and ran toward the place where Legolas had vanished.
Tas' pile of pirates all learned to fly at once. She emerged looking like a snapping turtle who's just survived being run over by a truck. Her head jerked toward Legolas' pirate pile and she waded into it. Body parts flew in every direction, and Ian and Liz leapt to join her, a cutlass in each of Liz's hands now.
"There'll be no living with her after this." I muttered.
Barbie stood by the ship's wheel, grin widening. watching them.
Not watching me. Not at all.
I don't climb and I don't run well on ship's gunnels. I'm not even sure why I was managing to block the pirates' cutlasses, except that it must have been part of Zan's spell. The deck was crowded with pirates, all hacking and slashing and swashing buckles. A stray line swung past my head, paused, and swung back. I grabbed it, hoping that the magic at the other end was Zan's and not Barbie's. I stuck the cutlass in my teeth and swung towards Barbie.
I smacked the cutlass broadside against Barbie's lightning wreathed arm. The lightnings shorted out with a loud frazzzt. She shrieked and turned to face me. I swung the cutlass again, hard. She ducked, dodged and gave me a shove as I staggered by totally off balance. I hit the deck and came up, cutlass still in hand.
New lightnings danced around her wrists. "I don't think Outer Mongolia's far enough for you." she snarled.
She was too far away for someone completely lacking in Elvish acrobatic skills. But I wasn't going to wait to find out where she really wanted to send me. I threw the sword. It whacked her on the side of the head on its way by, which had pretty much the effect of dropping hot butter on a live lobster.
Oh crap.
That's when Nightcrawler swung out of the rigging and scooped me up.
"Weeeeeaaaaaauuuggghhh!"
Below me, I saw Shenzi running full tilt at Nazgul Barbie's butt, grinning a wide, predatory grin.
"Aaaarrrgghhh!" Barbie shrieked.
And then Legolas swatted Barbie in the head with another cutlass. She went down like a sack of clams.
I clung to the blue velvet neck of my rescuer, as he went over the side and into the sea. "Zan? Ian? Tas?" I really hoped it wasn't some awful illusion Barbie had cooked up before she fell.
Ten feet above the water we bamfed.
I buried my face in his tousled mane, "Please tell me this isn't another tree."
"Open your eyes, liebling, you need to see where you're going!"
I felt myself swung down, and cracked an eyelid. Two feet of snow swallowed my feet. Far behind me I heard a few more muffled explosions and one "Agh!" I couldn't see anything through the blizzard though.
"Wow! Who brought Storm here?" I said.
"Zan." Nightcrawler said, "He's an amazing illusionist, especially considering how young he is." He crouched, tail twitching, watching something I couldn't see in the wall of moving white. "I'm really really sorry I missed most of that last one!" He frowned, "Wonder if I could get him to do it again."
I turned to look at him, "And how many times did you see it?" Pirates of the Caribbean, I meant.
"Ach." He smiled a small embarrassed smile, "Ahhhh."
I raised an eyebrow.
"Counting the DVD?" he began.
Shapes materialized out of the storm; Kodi and Liz and Legolas, one eye over his shoulder. Now that Zan's illusion was gone, and the cutlasses with it, he had unsheathed Dana's knives, still in his hands. Tas appeared in horse-shape with Ian and Zan aboard, and Shenzi hot on their heels. Behind them another explosion went off.
"I think she found the basement." Tas commented, melting out from under her riders.
Ian somersaulted to his feet and looked back. He flinched as another boom echoed from the house. He reached in his pocket and punched some numbers into his cell.
" Beam me up Scotty Summers." Zan said.
"Bran...BRAN...wherethehell are you guys!" Ian yelled into the phone.
Silence, static...then a rhythmic whup-whup-whup.
"Right here." Tulugaq's voice came over the airwaves. A great shadowy shape formed in the air above us, and drifted down.
"Or you could just send the Away Team." Zan added, sounding suspiciously like Captain Kirk.
The chopper settled in the snow, and three people piled out into the growing blizzard. Two tall and lean, and one short muscular shape, clad in black motorcycle leathers, disengaging itself from the cargo space. Doc grinned at us and reached back into the helicopter for a toolbox the size of Balin's Tomb. Jon stood staring in the direction of the last explosion.
"Like my little snowstorm?" Bran said.
"Good idea." Zan said, "My illusions only go so far. And it'll cover our tracks long enough for us to catch our breath."
Bran cocked an ear in the direction of the latest boom. "Had a little trouble?"
"You could say that." Ian said.
"Is Sauron trouble?" Legolas said grimly.
"Ja." Nighty muttered something else in German that I didn't quite catch.
Bran started to reply, in perfect German, then turned to put a face with the unfamiliar voice. He froze, mouth not quite able to form the next word.
"She opened another Gate." Ian said, as if that sort of thing happened all the time.
Jon cocked an eyebrow. "Noooo, really, you think?"
Nightcrawler grinned toothily and held out a gloved hand. "I'm.."
Jon took it with a courteous nod, and zero surprise. "Glad to have on our team, Nightcrawler. And we'll do our best to get you back to your own." He glanced at Bran.
"Ah..." Bran said, eyes gone impossibly wide. "Ahhhhh."
"He looks even goofier than you did." I said to Liz.
Without looking she punched me in the arm.
"Fanboys." Jon muttered under his breath, eyeing Bran. To Ian he said, "What does Nightcrawler know?"
"He's been around enough weird alternate universes in his life that finding himself in another one...along with one of his favorite literary characters...isn't strange at all. We told him about the comic, and the E.L.F. We've fought beside him and he's the guy we know from the comic, all the stuff we've..."
"...already told me way too much about." Jon finished. "At least we know his capabilities. That could be very important when we face this woman again. What happened, from the beginning."
Ian briefed Jon on Barbie Battle One. Zan crouched off to one side, poking at something in his pack. Doc wrestled the big box out into the snow. He dropped the huge box next to Nighty. Pried open the lid. "Some stuff in here I thought you guys could use." He pulled out a pair of black leather gloves, and stuffed his square, strong hands into them. He clenched his fists. Snikt. His bearded face had a grin on it like a kid at Christmas. "Been wantin' to try these out." He grinned at Nightcrawler, waving the foot-long claws now sprouting from his hands. "Hey Elf, whataya' think?"
"Wunderbar, bub." Nightcrawler grinned back.
Snakt. The claws retracted. "Not quite adamantium, but it'll do. Oh, hey I got something for you too, Bird Boy."
He handed Bran a hand-sized sculpture, shaped like a bird in flight. Bran's eyes were still fixed on Nightcrawler. Doc gave him a shove in the chest with the object. Bran blinked and looked down. "Ya were in such a great hurry ya almost forgot this."
Bran took it and raised it as if he were holding the hilt of a sword, blue light sprang from it, forming a lean, mean rapier blade.
"Unglaublich!" Nighty said, "A lightsaber!"
Legolas leaned closer, "Like Anduril"...he reached out a hand, and didn't quite touch it. "But there is no blade. Only the light."
"Yeah. It's pure energy, sky energy. My element." Bran said, his eyes still glued on his favorite X-Man.
Doc reached into the box again. He pulled out a short, sturdy mooncurve of grey wood. He held it out to Legolas.
The Elf stared at it, half reaching, "What?"
"Take it, draw it like a bow." Doc said, with some impatience.
Legolas closed his hand around the grey wood, and green light shot from the ends to form the curve of a six foot longbow.
"You can't see the 'string', but it's there." Doc said. "Draw it like a normal bow, but think about exactly what you want it to do first. Blow up a building or just knock somebody out." He rummaged in his box again, and withdrew three cutlasses much like the ones Zan had just formed in his illusion. Doc handed them to Nightcrawler. "I didn't know you were going to be here, but the Grandmothers told me to bring these. And I couldn't figure out why they wanted three matched ones." He eyed Nighty's tail, making snakey shapes in the snow, "Yeah, three. Makes sense now."
Nightcrawler took them, a Christmas sized grin growing on his face.
"Elven design, Dwarf-forged. Can't beat 'em. And they have a strange effect on things magical." He reached once more into the great box, and drew forth a staff, shaped like Liz's broken bo. Doc faced Liz and bowed slightly, "For you my lady, it will feel like the ones you are used to..."
She accepted it with the kind of grace Legolas had shown accepting the bow from Dana.
"...but it will do much more."
The bo shimmered with faint light, the color of fireflies.
Doc reached into the box one last time and pulled out another short mooncurve of wood, this one he tossed to Jon. The pale-haired Elf took it and light the color of ice shot from the ends. He gave it a quick once-over with his eyes and hands. The light went out and he sheathed it on his belt, his eyes looking like a hawk who's just spotted a nice big juicy prey item.
I stood watching the Gifting, like the one in Lothlorien. I felt like a small Hobbit seeing the great warriors get magic arms and armour. What would a Hobbit ask of the Elves? A magic computer, maybe. That's it, I'd done my part, I'd done what I was good at, me and Nighty, breaking codes and downloading a bunch of stuff that hopefully, would be useful. Now it was up to the people who could kick ass.
So why did I feel so disappointed?
I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. Two-fingered.
"I am NOT going home now. You'll have to tie me up and ship me there in a sack." I told him.
"I know."
"I have no idea what use I can be but..."
"You are part of the team. Part of the Fellowship." He slung an arm across my shoulders and gave me a hard squeeze. Best buds, partners. It was almost better than a prom night kiss.
Doc stumped over through the snow, well above his knees. "My lady," he said with a small bow.
The next words were going to be 'get in the helicopter, we're taking you home'. Well, no way, I owed that barracuda in heat for kidnapping me, for zapping Nightcrawler, and frying Legolas, and all the rest of it.
"This is for you." Doc said. He held out a scroll.
Yeah, a scroll, something ancient and magical looking, on deep golden parchment (it appeared to be the real sheepskin kind too). It was tied with a deep blue ribbon and hand-painted Elvish runes danced around the edges.
"Go ahead, you'll need to take a look at it now."
I unrolled it. It was a linguist's dream, a whole series of short poems hand-calligraphied in Elvish, in English, in German, in half a dozen other languages. All languages I knew something of.
And they all sounded oddly familiar.
I looked up at Doc, "These are all bits of Tolkien's songs and poems from Lord of the Rings."
"Yup." he said grinning.
"I know most of these by heart, the whole poems, I mean." I stared at the scroll, puzzled, "What am I supposed to do with this?"
"Say them out loud at the right moment. They're spells."
"What? I'm not a magic user. And these are just bits of poetry from the book!"
"You're a linguist, and words have power. These words had power in the original book. Look at how they've touched the world." Doc glanced at Nightcrawler, swinging his cutlasses in silver circles, a few feet from Legolas studying his new bow. "Worlds." He amended. He tapped the scroll, "The Grandmothers wrote these out, for you. Just for you."
I scanned the scroll. "But what do they do?"
Doc reached out with a gloved hand and rolled it back up into my hand. "That's for you to find out." He closed his big broad hands over mine. He didn't need to say any more.

O.R.C.s
We made a circle in the windshadow of the helicopter, around us, the storm whirled white madness, but in our little eye of the storm, only a few flakes drifted down, you could almost hear them fall. The Elves, and Ian, and Nightcrawler and our lone Dwarf had been discussing battle strategy. Liz crouched in the snow between Legolas and Tas, the new bo flickering its faint firefly light. I half listened, reading and re-reading my scroll. Nightcrawler crouched by me, tail twitching against the snow, in a typical pose that only Spiderman could have copied. Jon stood on the other side of him, arguing across the circle with Tas.
The basic plot was:
Tas: Let's kill something. Track her down and deliver her to the Grandmothers, whole or in parts. Preferably parts. She looked like Wolverine on a bad hair day.
Jon: Let her find us. Let her walk into the trap. We are still dealing with human law and order here. You've already done enough breaking and entering and shattering of fine china for one adventure. The plan is...
Bran: Plan? What plan? Since when have we ever needed a plan?
Ian: Murphy's Law. Things never go as planned anyhow.
Doc: Shakes head and attempts futilely to hammer order out of the midst of chaos.
Zan: Duct tape. Did anybody remember duct tape?
Nightcrawler and Legolas understood the wisdom of the old saying that you were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. They were used to working in teams, even leading them, but they were strangers here, so both listened twice as much as they talked, though Jon often asked them for their input.
Jon shifted his stance, "There is a defensible place nearby. We can lay a trail there. After all she will want to find us..."
Nightcrawler leapt from his crouch, "OW!"
Jon looked down, his Elven Warrior expression changing suddenly to embarrassment, "...oh...sorry about the tail."
Nightcrawler stepped behind me, one hand running down the length of his tail, "It's fine." he said. He stayed behind me.
"She's going to have some trouble finding us." Tas said, "We've got her palawntir."
Jon gave her a look like an eagle. One eyebrow raised in a questionmark. Tas nodded at Zan.
"Um." he said.
Jon cocked a meaningful eyebrow.
"I was gonna tell you." Zan reached into the pack and produced the big red ball. He handed it to Jon.
Jon studied it for a minute, then tossed it back. "You're Harry Potter, you figure out what else it can do."
Zan gave him a relieved smile.
Tas gave him a long look, "Maybe more like Ron Weasley."
"So how is she going to find us?" Liz asked, "Without the palawntir?"
Jon gave her of his hawk looks, "We'll send up flares if necessary. Maybe put up a neon sign or two."
"This place you speak of, where is it?" Legolas asked.
"The quarry?" Ian said.
Jon nodded.
"Old limestone quarry." Doc grinned. "Big cliffs. Good bones!"
"A fortress can also be turned into a trap." Tas said.
Bran shook his head. "Easy to play with the weather in there. I could make us a nice temperature inversion, warm things up a bit. Make a little fog. And it's a kind of magical nexus."
"But can't Nazgul Barbie use the magic too?" Liz asked.
"Yes." Then Jon's grim expression broke, he smiled and it was nearly as scary as Nightcrawler. "But not as well. This is our magic." He turned to Bran. "And the water. That's your realm as much as air, thunderbird." Jon said. "There we will set our trap."
"Water?" I said. I swim exactly the way dolphins don't.
"Cool!" Liz said.
Zan grinned and a miniature Elven Grey Ship floated out of his hands.
Legolas' eyes widened. "Elo!"
"I can make a bigger one." Zan said, spinning the red palawntir on one finger.
Nightcrawler's grin stretched wider than Zan's. "Can we do the pirate ship again?"
Our potential transportation, the Windrider, was full of books. Barbie's books. And the Ravin' Maniac could only haul three or four very friendly people at most. And it was too far to bamf or phoomph. And the storm had not abated. If anything, it was worse.
Bran cast a weather eye skyward, a map from the Ravin' Maniac dangling from one hand. No, not exactly dangling, blowing in the wind.
Jon gave him a long appraising look.
"Ididn'tdoit youdidn'tseemedoit youcan'tproveathing." Bran said.
"Birdbrain, You were supposed to make it temporarily hard for her to follow us, not impossible!" Tas said.
"Weather is an art, not a science. And there's some very strange stuff going on here...not my doing." He frowned at the sky again, "Well, the Ravin's grounded, for now, and so am I."
"And even if we could fit us all in the Windrider, she's not going to plow through this stuff." Tas added.
Shenzi and Kodi grinned up at us.
"We have two perfectly good sled dogs." I said. Everyone turned to look at me as if I had suddenly turned blue and grown a set of wings.
"You might have noticed the lack of a sled, and harness?." Liz said. "Anyway, we'd need more dogs. And a trail. We'd have to break a trail through this."
"Sled's easy." Zan said. He vanished into the whiteout, waving to Legolas and Doc to follow. A minute later they returned with a bunch of sticks and branches.
"Ahhh." Liz said. "Interesting, but unless Doc's got way more tools in the Ravin' Maniac, that's not gonna work."
Zan set the palawntir in the snow, then held out a hand in Doc's direction, "Duct tape." he said, like a surgeon asking for a scalpel. Doc retreated to the Ravin' and returned in a moment with three rolls, in blue, yellow and an appalling shade of green. Zan motioned to Ian and Doc and the three set to work. Doc hacked branches down to size with his claws, and the other two taped bits of branch and stick together. In a few minutes something more or less sled shaped emerged.
"That," Liz said doubtfully, "is not gonna fly."
Legolas frowned at the contraption, wiggled the driving bow with a hand. "It seems flexible, yet strong enough."
"But rather..." Nightcrawler cocked his head like a raven eying a carcass that might suddenly spring to life and devour him, "...spikey." Twigs stuck out like feathers on a windblown parrot, and despite Doc's best attempts at instant Dwarvish craftsmanship, the runners were obviously not going to run very far.
Zan grinned at both of them and squatted down by the brush bow at the front. Lightnings played around Zan's gloved hands, blue-white, the color of arctic ice. Behind him, the palawntir danced with tiny lightnings. The light spread and flowed over the collection of taped tree bits. They melted, reformed, and a sleek, light sled stood there.
"Damn!" Liz said. "Can I keep it?"
"It will last as long as we need it, as long as I'm near it." Zan said. "I can't make permanent stuff, even with a good base to work with, like branches and duct tape. And we still need some harness."
"No problem." Tas said. She melted, like a snowman in the sun, and the red wolf stood in her place, wearing a harness. "Romm rarry reh rhis rroff reee!" she arrooed.
"Anybody here speak wookie?" Bran said.
"Or Scooby." Liz added.
The red wolf turned and grinned a huge toothy warning grin. Scarier than Shenzi and 'Crawler combined.
Legolas knelt and pulled the harness off, handing it to Liz, who found it to be a perfect fit for Kodi.
Tas shifted again and melted into another wolf in harness, this one fit Shenzi. On the next meltdown Tas stayed in wolf-shape, harness and all. Doc found some rope in the Maniac, and our three-dog team was ready to roll.
"That takes care of Doc and Lorien and Liz," Jon said, "Bran can ride on the driving bow in Raven form."
"That's a lot for three dogs." Liz cut in.
"You've got Wolf." Jon said, nodding at the big red canine in front. "She'll pull as much as a horse, and break trail too. Liz can run and pedal and push. The rest of us can run..."
"On snow? Like Legolas on Caradhras?" I said.
Jon glanced at Legolas. "Like Caradhras."
"When was I on Caradhras?" Legolas asked.
Nightcrawler cast him a toothy, knowing grin.
"What?" Legolas said, eyes narrowing. "Come on..."
"So what do you know about my father..." Nightcrawler began.
Jon stepped between them, eyes an icy warning. "You'll find out soon enough in your own timelines. If we ever get you back there."
We huddled around the map, picking out a route. By now the roads would be under snow, and travelers would be holed up by nice warm fires, wrapping last minute Christmas presents. We could cut almost straight across country, as the raven flies.
Doc rummaged in the Great Box one last time and produced several sets of skis with poles. "I thought this might be useful, seeing how the weather was developing." He handed a set to Ian, who nodded thanks. He scanned the rest of the crew, his eyes coming to rest on Nightcrawler. "Elves with skis are kind of like a windjammer with an outboard motor. Pointless. But you...you know how to use these things?"
"Bavaria." Kurt said, "Alps? You know, big pointy mountains with snow, lots of it? I spent some time there as a child."
"The next trick will be getting those feet into the boots." Doc said, frowning at Nightcrawler's oversized two-toed feet...
"No problemo." Zan said, in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. He caught a pair of boots Doc tossed and knelt by Nightcrawler with them. Blue lightnings played around his hands and over the boots. In a moment our blue Elf was mounted on skis.
The other Elves stood at the ready, all of them standing on the deepening snow as easily as if they were standing on firm beach sand.
I climbed into the sled's basket with Doc, he handed me a set of ski goggles. "It'll get messy back here with Wolf in the lead." Liz took her place on the runners, and Bran, now in his dark silver raven form, perched on the driving bow with wings half spread for balance.
"Mush!" quoth the raven.
"It's 'hike!' bird brain," Liz said amiably, she crouched between the runners and shoved. And Wolf plunged forward into the whirling whiteout.

The indigo pooka parka with its wolf-fur hood edging was warm, even in the blowing whiteout that obscured everything but the dogs in front of me. I could just see the shadowy shape of Tas plunging at the front of the team. The dogs were strung out in a single file line, not paired the way Liz had run them before. This way they could follow easily in Tas' trail. The Elves had vanished, running ahead, and behind, leaving no more than faint imprints in the snow. If I turned and looked past Doc's bulky, huddled blackleather shape I could make out Ian skiing behind the sled. When we hit broader stretches of trail or road, a shadow would materialize out of the storm and resolve into Nightcrawler on skis, or Legolas running as easily on the snow as the skiers did. We held the pace for what seemed like hours.
Suddenly shadows appeared on all sides, and welcome color after all the endless white; blue and black and tailed on skis, then the bright blue of Zan's parka, and Aiwei's winter wood greys, and the tree-green of Legolas' parka. Ian skied up from the rear, exchanged glances and a few curt gestures with Jon and vanished back behind us again. The dogs stopped. Bran floated down from his place on the driving bow, the birdform blurred and shifted and he stood beside me clad in something that looked suspiciously like a blackleather X-uniform. Doc tossed him something and Bran raised his hand.
Blue fire cut through the blinding blizzard. To Bran's left I saw a flash of green fire, Legolas' bow. I saw Liz's bo slide past me into her hands. Doc piled out of the sled, and pulled me with him. "Get your scroll," he said.
I stood, wiped plastered snow off my goggles, and still couldn't see anything but shadows and the glimmer of the magic weapons.
"Are we there yet?" I asked, and realized how dumb it sounded. This didn't look anything like a quarry. But then I couldn't see any farther than Tas' butt. Great, Nazgul Barbie's caught us before we even get out of the Shire. I fumbled the scroll open and tried to read it through the falling snow. I knew the poems already, at least the whole ones, but these were odd fragments, and maybe they would only work the way they were written. And none of them looked like real spells. No fireballs or icestorms or magic missles like D&D wizards carried around, just things like fragments of Tom Bombadil's songs, Pippin's bath song, Treebeard's Lore of Living Things.
Beside me Bran raised his other hand and said something into the wind.
The snow fell back, swirled away on every side, revealing the stark lines of crowded trees against piling snow, and the Fellowship in a protective ring around the sled, all of them poised for action.
The reason was emerging from behind the trees like stalking wargs. Dark shapes that resolved themselves into something human.
No, not human. Not at all. They were man-sized, and walked on two legs. No, not walked, not like humans, they moved like predators. Slithery, powerful, as if they could suddenly kick in the turbos and be in your face, or at your throat. Something about the movement was familiar. I couldn't place it. Not the leopard grace of Nightcrawler, or the catlike fluidity of Legolas. Something...
...older. They made me think of raptors. The ones in Jurassic Park.
And they had tails, like Nightcrawler, but thicker, and tapering to a thin whippy point.
More like those raptors.
"Wha...what are those?" I whispered to no one in particular.
Behind me Doc rumbled through his beard, "Orcs."
A few feet away Legolas snapped his head toward us, "Yrch?"
"Whoa." Liz said. "Orcs. Cool." She spun her bo once, leaving a trail of firefly light in the air.
"Cool was not the word I had in mind." I said under my breath. My hand tightened on the scroll. Beside me Legolas tensed like a leopard ready to spring, his eyes gone ice green.
Ok, so there's Elves here, I guess there would have to be orcs too. Not Peter Jackson's movie orcs, more like the way I had always imagined them when I read the book. Toothy and scaley and utterly inhuman.
At first I thought they were wearing some kind of skin-tight leathers. Then they came to a stop, barely thirty feet away, and I realized they were covered in something like short, dense fur, streaked and spotted in camoflage patterns, and the kinds of colors you never find on mammals, only on birds, or reptiles; forest greens and shadowy blues and deep purples in a thousand subtle, impossible shades. On a few of the nearest ones, a ripple of raised hackles cascaded across neck and shoulders, making them look even bigger and badder. I realized suddenly they weren't covered in fur. It was feathers; close and sleek like penguin feathers. A few longer ones poked out of strategic places among the pattern of scales on their faces and heads. Some of the scales flowed into horns and spikes and other wicked looking projections.
Jon stood between the rest of the Fellowship and the orcs, fisted hands held close in some sort of martial arts pose, as if warding off great evil.
A tall orc, head feathers raised in a great crest, hands folded like Jon's, stepped forward. His eyes fell on Liz and her bo, balanced in both hands and poised for action. He bared his mouthful of shark's teeth and took a step toward her.
A lightning bolt of green hit the orc square in the chest.
The world erupted into chaos around me, Jon shouted something back in our direction, then he was running toward the orcs. They were roaring like dragons. And flying in all directions like a drop-kicked nest of hornets. To my right I saw Legolas move to fire again and saw a blue blur knock him down. Ian passed me on skis, and Bran's sword went to his side and went out. Nightcrawler crouched beside the sled, off his skis with all three cutlasses unsheathed until Zan, perched on Legolas' chest, shouted at him to drop them.
The world went suddently still. The orcs stalked closer, a tight ring around us, with no way out, except for our teleporters. Shenzi crouched, growling, Kodi flattened behind her, ears down. The great red wolf stood in front of them, every hair on end, teeth bared. Nightcrawler crouched beside us still, swords sheathed and fists in that odd pose Jon had adopted. Bran and the others were doing the same.
The spell scroll dangled uselessly from my hands. I realized I was barely breathing, I tightened my grip around the scroll and did a recentering breath. One of the orcs stepped closer, teeth bared, hackles flickering up like movie Mystique shapeshifting. Those teeth made Nightcrawler's look wimpy.
"No more magic." the orc said clearly, eyes as yellow and alien as a dinosaur's stared into mine.
Ian was kneeling beside a fallen body, even from where I was, I could see the warm green glow of the healing power he was drawing from the earth. Jon stood beside him, having a rapid-fire conversation with another orc, the big one, with the stance of a leader.
Why is Ian fixing an orc? And why is Jon apologizing?
Zan stood, and Legolas flowed to his feet behind him. Legolas' bow was in Zan's hands, and the tall Elf looked angry and confused.
"He is not from our world." Jon was saying, "He does not know the ways of your people."
The shadow shape on the snow moved, then sprang up like a bird released from a cage. Ian rocked back on his heels, the orc stood over him, teeth bared, hackles raised, panting. Then it blinked, looked around, looked down at Ian.
It held out a strongly clawed hand to Ian and pulled him to his feet.
"What the...?" Liz whispered beside me.
The one Jon had been talking to made a gesture, hands folded so the claws were not visible. The tall pale-haired Elf bowed in return, and made a similar gesture.
The leader orc said something to the others, something that sounded more of hawk and owl and alligator than human speech. The ring of orcs backed up another thirty feet.
Bran motioned for us to come up beside him and Zan and the others. We formed a loose ring, half a dozen orcs coming to complete the circle, their crests clipped and raised in various configurations.
Maybe a sign of their rank, I thought.
Legolas looked grim. Nightcrawler looked fascinated.
The tall leader came forward, his voice sounded like an alligator who had learned Oxford English, "We sensed an enormous display of power, southeast, ten miles." he pointed in the direction we'd come. "We know the scent of one of the folk using that magic." He made a sound, like an annoyed owl, "She is troublesome, but until now, it has been better for us to remain hidden, than to face her. For some time she has been fomenting dissatisfaction among some of our clans. Some wish to use human technology rather than keep to the traditional path. She makes it easier for them to acquire it. And they," here he made another disgusted noise, "repay the favors." He stepped closer and looked Jon in the eye, neither flinched, "They are on the move. And," his golden eyes drifted over Legolas, like an eagle watching a smaller hawk, "they are looking for you. They will not honor the Pact."
"How many, where?" Jon said.
The leader knelt in the snow, flattening a broad swath with his clawed hands. Two-fingered, I noticed, plus thumb, and his feet, visible on the trampled snow had two front-facing toes and one huge hooked claw beside them.
"Dude," Liz whispered, "their hands are like 'Crawler's."
I shook my head, "Yeah, but look at the feet. More like Deinonychus, or Utahraptor."
"Unglaublich! You are right!" Nightcrawler said under his breath, yellow eyes gone wide.
Legolas stood, half crouched like a cat ready to spring, every line of his body tense as a drawn bow.
Liz narrowed her eyes, a look of concentration on her face. Like she was trying to see something. Or remember it.
"What?" I whispered.
"Feathers." she said, her eyes widening in enlightenment.
The big orc rapidly drew lines with a curved claw showing the movements of other groups of orcs. "They are, unfortunately, mounted, and swift."
"Mounted, on what?" Jon said.
Yeah, I couldn't picture them getting anywhere near a horse, except for lunch.
The orc leader grumbled something deep and disgusted, "Smoking, oil-leaking rrrorrarhoom that eat up the ground and poison the air. Four-wheelers, a few snowmobiles, and the favorite of the young who lack a sense of their own mortality; the off-road cycle."
"Off Road Cycles." Zan whispered to us, then broke into a grin, "Get it?"
"Wha?" Liz said.
"O.R.C.s." I gave her a shove.
She sputtered through her nose until the nearest orc raised his hackles at her.
Jon and the leader huddled over the impromptu strategy map. After a few minutes the orc stood again. He turned to his clan and said something to them in his own tongue. They answered with a deep, nearly inaudible rumble. I thought of elephants and how they could communicate over great distances with sound below the hearing range of humans. The leader turned to us, "We cannot move as fast as you over the snow, or as fast as our mounted young. But we will follow you. And we will deal with the young you have..." a gleam like that of a hawk eying up a fat rabbit came into the leader's eyes, "dismounted. We want this woman stopped." He paused and cast an eye over his clan, "Long ago, we would have dealt with her in our own way, but in this age, the humans and their laws are too thick and near."
"That we can handle, Ashnarii." Jon said, and there was something in his eyes like thunderheads before a storm.
"As ever you are a worthy member of your clan, Aiwei son of Awyr and Nawein." They stood eye to eye for a long moment, touched folded fists, then each turned, and fell back with their own folk. Jon caught Legolas' shoulder in a firm grip, pulling him with him.
I looked at them, then back into the woods, the trees were swallowed in blowing snow and the orcs were gone. And the snow showed only our tracks, and the dogs', and something like the trampled trails of deer.
Legolas turned to face Jon, "I have been in your world long enough to see a great deal I do not understand. But this...this is more than I can fathom." his voice had an edge like knives. "You say they are yrch, and they are not wholly unlike the yrch of my homeland, yet you make pacts with them, as if they can be trusted."
"Morlocks." Nightcrawler said thoughtfully.
Legolas turned with the speed of a hawk. "What? What has this got to do with mutants?"
"The mutants nobody loves, hiding in the tunnels under the city." Liz added. "The ugly, scary ones. But not evil."
No, it is not evil...I catch only the faintest echoes of dark places where the hearts of the trees are black...those had been Legolas' words at the edge of Fangorn. So why, I thought, did he not see the orcs for who they are?
"Yeah." Zan said, "They get much the same reaction as the Morlocks did. They aren't the corrupted Elves of Middle-earth, but maybe they gave rise to the same legends here. We are related, your folk and mine," the red-haired Elf indicated Nightcrawler, and Ian, and Liz and me, "but the orcs are from elsewhen."
"They look like what would happen if Utahraptor had a few more million years to evolve." Liz said.
"That would be a grey parrot," I said.
"Dragonkin." The voice was Bran's. "That's their real name, or as close to it as we can get in our limited tongues." Bran said. "They don't like technology, most of them, at least. They don't use tools or fire. And they know the wilderness as well as any Elf. But they don't think quite like Elves, or Men. More like sharks. Or raptors."
"You don't mean birds of prey, do you?" Liz said.
"No. And they're completely carnivorous. Which never put them on humans' list of charismatic megafauna, like blue whales. They don't understand why humans would want to put a whole herd of prey animals in a pasture and keep them all to themselves."
"Huh?" Liz said.
"Cows. Sheep, horses." Zan said.
"Tends to make humans want to track them down and wipe them out." Bran said.
"Like wolves." I said.
"Yeah." Zan said. "We did get the local ones to focus on the overabundant deer population, instead of the cows."
"They weren't carrying any weapons." Nightcrawler observed.
"They don't need them." Jon said. He made a slashing motion with one hooked finger. Like a great claw.
"Magic. The big leader guy said something about magic." Liz said. "They can sense it, can they use it?"
"How do you think they've stayed invisible in a world crowded with humans?" Bran said. "It's not like they can blend in with the human population or anything."
I glanced at Nightcrawler, his tail, in a color never found on mammals, twitching against the snow. He regarded Bran with an unreadable yellow gaze.
"Yes." Jon said, "Though they do not channel energy the same way we do. They can hide, elude, cover their tracks, make you think you've seen something other than what you really have, if they wish. Their guises deceive even us."
"The Professor there means they can fool Elves too." Bran said. He was silent for a few beats, then, "Dragonkin. Dragons opened the Gates. Dragonkin can walk through them, even create their own eddies in the timestream, Otherwhens, Faerie. And in thousands of years of us knowing them, no-one has ever found one of their bodies."
Liz said, "How?"
"They have their secrets. And they share few of them with us. And less with humans."
"Wait." Liz said, "Gates...walk through them. You mean teleport? Like 'Crawler going through the Darkforce Dimension? Can they open Gates, like you guys, to other places they haven't been to before?"
"They have their secrets," Bran said. "Why?"
"Just a brainfart." Liz said no more.
"Formidable warriors, no doubt." It was Legolas who had spoken, a kind of grudging admiration in his voice.
"Yeah, I wouldn't want those guys to be on the other side." Liz said.
"Those were their women." Bran said.
"Rather, ah, flatchested, don't you think?" Nightcrawler said.
"Birds don't have boobs, I doubt dinosaurs did either." Liz said.
Nightcrawler blinked, and glanced away. I swear his face went purple with embarassment. He cleared his throat then, "Then things will get interesting when we meet their males."
"Raptors." Liz said, "The females are bigger. At least in birds."
Bran nodded, "Same with them. And a lot of the Off Road Cycle guys are young males, kids who want the kind of power they see humans having."
"Then they will be doubly dangerous," Legolas said, "if they can elude our senses and come on us unawares with their swift machines."
Jon's expression was like the keen edge of a blade, "What they have not realized is that they cannot use their traditional gifts and human technology. We will at least hear them coming. And maybe their kin will meet them first."
"And when they don't?" Nightcrawler said.
Aiwei gave Legolas a long, hard look. "Let's just say if we kill any of them, things could get real messy in Yrch County."
"Their swords and spears shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them."
It was Nightcrawler who had spoken, quoting the line from The Hobbit, where the Elves of Mirkwood charge the orc horde at the Lonely Mountain. He studied Legolas, indigo face a mask of calm, his golden gaze still unreadable.
Legolas gave him a long, questioning look.
"A description of your folk in battle, and of their bitter hatred for the orcs of Middle-earth."
"I heard what Jon said." His face was impassive, like a hawk's.
"And your bow channels your thoughts."
"Yet your weapons are good only for killing."
"True, but I am used to fighting without them. 'Many live that deserve death. And many die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'"
"Who said that, one of your great sages?"
"One of yours, mein freund, Gandalf, Mithrandir."
Legolas remained silent for a minute. Then, "I too can fight without a bow, mellon nin." He touched the grey mooncurve of wood, where it hung in its sheath. "Or turn this one to gentler use." He turned to Nightcrawler, "But if it is necessary," he gestured toward Liz and me, "I will do what is needed to protect them. Whatever is needed."
Nightcrawler nodded, catlike fangs just visible.


PART THE FOURTH

Over the River and Through the Woods
canaphae-ar-leneg: Legolas
"What is it, mein freund?" Kurtvagner skied up beside me and stared into the whirling snow. "Legolas? Can you see through this?"
"No." I told him.
"Neither can I."
But I heard something. When I first came to this world, it had buzzed in my ears like an annoying fly, but I had become used to it, and no longer noticed it. Now, with the world wrapped in the silent blanket of the blizzard, I had noticed its absence. The constant roar of distant engines was no more.
Until now. They were still far away, many miles, perhaps. But they were drawing nearer.
I could feel it. I pointed. "They are coming."
He answered with a nod, then we moved to tell the others. The sled set a new course, down over the edge of the road into the woods. Ian skied ahead of it, finding a path through the trees, while Tas broke trail at the head of the team. Jon, Bran, Kurtvagner and I fell back, a light, mobile shield between the oncoming orcs and the sled. The others would stay with the sled.
And yes, two of us in the rear were the ones the orcs most wanted to find.
Jon stopped in the trail, barely visible only a few feet away, "Keep going." he told us. He scanned the trees behind us, his eyes finally lighting on one empty of creatures in their winter sleep. He raised his bow and drew the unseen string. Light blazed like the light of Vilya, and a great bolt the color of ice shot forth. The tree fell with a great groan across our trail. "That'll slow them down." he said, turning and running again.
"Perhaps." I said.
We moved in the tracks the sled had left, allowing the sled team to widen the gap between it, and us...and the orcs. Bran spoke words into the wind and the tracks vanished behind us, erased by blowing snow.
The buzz of distant engines changed from the sound of flies on a summer evening, to the growl of a dragon roused from slumber.
"They grow near." I told Jon. I heard the pause and sputter of engines as the orcs found the fallen tree, and made a way around it.
Then the woods fell silent for many breaths.
"They've lost our trail." Bran said with satisfaction.
We moved again, hoping they would lose the trail for good. Hoping we could reach the fortress of the quarry first.
"They're as keen as hounds on a scent. They don't really need a trail." Jon said. "Though this snow will make it hard to find our scent."
"Their noses are probably useless," Bran said, "burned out by too much oil and exhaust." Stupid punk kids." His face showed distaste, but none of the deep hatred my folk had for the evil folk of Mordor.
We ran, lightly, an ear to the emptiness behind us.
The engines roared, the sound of Smaug's kin as they picked up our trail again.
"I'll have a look." Kurtvagner said, and a bright flash of dragonbreath mingled with the whirling snow. A moment later he was back, dropping out of the air and flying forward on his skis. "Half a mile, no more."
"How many?" Jon asked, face grim as any Ranger's.
"All of them, I think."
"Great, just what I need, somebody else besides Zan spouting movie one-liners." Jon said, running after him.
"Smile, there's only thirty or so." Kurt called back, "Just enough to go around. Maybe a few for dessert."
We ran close as a wolfpack, the whiteout making us nearly invisible to one another, then Jon held up a hand, "Bran, do something about the lousy vis, would you."
Bran stood in the trail and raised his hands. I could see the skylight dancing around his edges, pouring through his hands, though anyone but another Elf...or Liz and Ian... would have seen nothing. The wall of white fell back, farther and farther.
Now we could see when they came. There would be a clear target for our bows. And for the swords of the Ravenkin, Bran, and the Walker of Night, Morathradon. We faded into the trees, waiting. Watching with the patience and silence of Owl. Bran swung up into a low branch above us. Kurtvagner could hide as well as any Elf, blending into the shadows of the tree-trunks, only his golden eyes visible to those who knew where to look.
We did not have long to wait. They came on us with a great roaring, I could feel even the trees tremble in their wake, and all of the creatures of that wood fled or hid. They were clad in black leathers, the sort of thing Men wear who ride such beasts; layers of black, padded and armoured, making their lean, small forms huge and fearsome. Their helms were dark and featureless, covering even their eyes with something like dark glass, though it would not break easily. Their clawed feet were hidden in boots, and their hands were disguised by their gloves so they looked like Men.
But strangest of all were their tails. Or the lack of them.
"Docktails." Jon whispered. "I thought so from Ashnarii's description." His face went even grimmer.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Young punks. They veer so far from the path of their ancestors, they cut off their tails so they can blend into human culture. At least as long as they leave their motorcycle leathers on."
"Their faces look very little like Men." I said.
"They can disguise those too." Bran said.
Jon's face held a veneer of disgust. "She was right. They will honor none of the traditions of their folk."
"You're saying they will kill us without a thought." Kurtvagner said, all three of his swords at the ready.
"Maybe not you. Or Legolas. Maybe Nazgul Barbie still wants you two alive. Maybe."
"They will have to go through us to get to the rest of you." Kurtvagner said, and his eyes glowed like the lights of the Two Trees.
Jon turned to me and read my heart in my eyes. "Remember. We are not to kill them! Let their own Grandmothers deal with them when we have laid them on the ground!"
I studied their movements as they closed in from the edge of the wall of snow. "Their armor is bulky, but their bodies are not."
"Don't let that fool you. They're as fast as falcons. And they can leap like kangaroos!" Jon said, raising his bow.
"What," I asked him, "is a kangaroo?"
Bran coiled on his perch, ready to spring. "They're here." He said, eyes glittering like Raven's fixed on a juicy feast.
From Jon's bow of ice and fire flew bolts of white light. The skis of the nearest snowmobile blasted into bits, the machine tumbling over itself and vanishing into a drift. The rider flew and fell, a smaller bolt of icy light hit him square in the chest.
He moved no more.
I fired my own bow, aiming for the vulnerable places of the machines, as Jon had instructed. I did not wish to hit the fuel tanks, for that would be worse for all of us than the Fire of Isengard itself. The first great green bolt sliced through a four-wheeled machine, two trees, and a cycle. I stared, aghast, as the living trees fell with a groan and crash.
Then the falling branches snared three snowmobiles, a four-wheeler and two cycles, like fish in a net. The four-wheeler that my bolt had hit exploded in a great fireball. The rider had already vaulted off and hit the snow running.
He did not run far. A cloud of bright smoke appeared just above him, and Kurtvagner landed on him, feet striking his black helm with the speed of a falcon. He leapt up from the flattened orc, eyed the fallen trees, "You might want to recalibrate that bow." he said.
I gave him a quick nod, and fired at a lone four-wheeled machine. The rider made a desperate leap as the machine blew into a fountain of flame. A great belch of fire and smoke engulfed the rider, and when it cleared he had vanished.
Kurtvagner appeared, looked down into the snow where the rider had vanished. "Unglaublich! Their armor is almost better than X-suits! He's not even..."
The orc leapt out of the snowhole and reached for Kurt's neck. He ducked, flipped out of the way and countered with a swift kick.
I drew the bow, and frowned at it. I did not want to risk blowing Kurtvagner into small blue bits. And it would not be wise to anger him, or Jon, or all the orcs of Yrch County by blowing the orc into small bits either.
In the next moment, Kurtvagner's orc was flattened at his feet. He held a hand up when he saw my bow. "Nein, nein, nein, Mein freund!"
"I'm recalling, rebating...I'm...I'm fixing it, OK?"
I fired again, into the running tread of the next snowmachine. It flapped like a dying dragon, and the machine spun into a tree in pieces.
"Ja!" Kurtvagner said with enthusiasm, "Makes me want to take up archery!"
I watched him wielding his swords with the ease of my light knives. "Ja!" I called to him, "Perhaps I should get bigger knives!"
Machines died with a great gouting of smoke and flame. Riders clad in black leather tumbled and lay still, though they yet breathed.
But others roared by, reaching for us from belching beasts with the speed of an angered bear. Some leapt from their mounts at full speed, reaching for us with hands or booted feet. Bran leapt and spun like a bird in flight and kicked several from their noisome mounts. His light sword spun blue circles in the chill air, slicing through machines as if they were carved of snow, stunning riders as if the sword was only the blow of a well-placed hand.
Kurtvagner appeared and reappeared in the most unexpected places; bamfing in above them and swinging his cutlasses broadside into dark, featureless helmets, or slashing straight through the howling machines. Surprised, they were, but not for long. They leapt from their disabled machines like striking snakes. One hand struck Kurtvagner, like the closing jaws of an adder, the orc roared in surprise when Kurt vanished in his characteristic burst of flame and smoke. Another leapt at Bran with both booted feet, knocking him, winded, into the snow. Kurt reappeared above the orc's head and swung a mighty blow with his cutlass. The creature fell, stunned.
"Nine!" Kurtvagner called.
"Ten!" I called back, moving to Bran's side.
"Elf!" Kurtvagner shouted, three cutlasses slicing into tire and engine and flattening the rider all at once.
"What?" I shouted back.
"I mean, eleven! Their lack of tails is throwing them off balance! They do not move with the speed of their women!" His own tail caught the neck of a passing orc and flipped him neatly into a tree trunk, while never dropping the cutlass that tail was wielding.
Bran rolled to his feet and spun through three more orcs, the sword a blue blur. "Fifteen." he called. "Your estimate of thirty was a bit on the light side, 'Crawler."
"I always did have trouble counting." he called, holding up a three-fingered hand.
The bow of green fire with which Doc had gifted me sang with the power of leaf and sun and mighty oak, with all the power of the great woods around us. Riders fell, and fell again, though I had to duck and dodge their swift leaps. But Kurtvagner was right. Once separated from their machines, they did not have the eerie grace of their women. They had given up their power for that of the machines. And once we took their machines out from under them, they were as grass before the scythe.
"Fourteen!" I shouted to Kurt.
"Fifteen!" he answered.
Jon cast us a hard glance and shook his head.
In the woods around us, just beyond the wall of white, a last few engines roared by. The rest lay still, and smoking, with their riders unconscious for now. I felt a rumble, as if the trees themselves had spoken.
"Their women are not far behind." Jon said. "We will leave the docktails to them. But there are others slipping by. Let's move!"

Lorien
"Are you sure!"
"No lass, this is not the time to use your spells, stay in the sled. Let the Elves do their work." Doc's hand on my shoulder was heavy.
I hunched on the sled in front of him, clutching the scroll, imagining Legolas, who had never suffered so much as a scratch in the entire War of the Ring, cut down by some punk orc kid on a four-wheeler. "Swear to all the Valar, I'm gonna turn her into a toad when I catch up to her!"
Doc chuckled, but then his voice turned serious, "Be careful lass, or you'll turn yourself into her."
I wiped the snow off my goggles, but without Bran pushing back the storm, I could only see as far as Shenzi's butt. Somewhere ahead of her, Wolf continued to break trail at a terrifying speed, Shenzi and Kodi leaping after her, seemingly tireless.
Behind us, something in the woods changed.
"Is that an engine?" I said to Doc.

canaphae-ar-odog: Legolas
"Some have taken a longer route! They've gone around us!" Jon called. He was already running in the direction the sled had taken.
"I'll go ahead!" Kurtvagner said.
"Don't you have to see where you're going?" Bran yelled back.
"It helps." he shoved himself forward faster on his skis, "But I think I remember what the sled looks like..."
And he was gone.

Lorien
A pair of skis appeared above my head in the midst of a flash of fuschia smoke, twisted sideways, and vanished into the whiteout.
"Bleearrrghh!" Doc grumbled, coughing.
"Aaaghh!" Zan said, ducking.
"Hey!" Liz shouted behind me. "George of the Jungle, watch out for that..."
"Sorry, liebling." There was a distinct thud.
"...tree." Liz said. "Whoa!" she called, and I heard the scrape of the sled brake.
I tumbled off the sled, ran back past the runners and found Nightcrawler in a pile at the base of a tree. Ow. And there I'd been imagining Legolas getting creamed by an orc. "Nighty?"
He rolled to his feet, skis and all. "I'm OK." he said, wavering a little. " Remind me never to pick a fight with an Ent."
Ian and Doc and Zan appeared out of the snow.
I could hear the distinct roar of engines now.
Nightcrawler pointed in the direction of the engines.
"The others..." Ian said, looking worried.
"Fine, but a few orcs slipped past. They're a mile or so behind us."
Doc grinned, "Jon and the others are behind them, and we in front. Snikt, snikt, the claws popped and closed like a set of jaws. "I was gettin' a little bored back here on the jingle-bell sleigh ride."
Ian peered into the whirling snow, as Tas pulled the team into a tight knot behind her, "We could really use Bran right now, to clear this snow." Ian said.
"When eyes are useless, use your ears, lad." Doc said. He crouched, claws extended and ready, looking uncannily like a Wolverine comic cover. Nightcrawler crouched beside him, cutlasses drawn, eyes narrowed, head cocked as if listening.
I unrolled the scroll, eyes searching frantically for something that would be of use. Poems, they're just poems. What good would 'hey dol, merry dol, ring a dong dillo' possibly do?
Zan peered over my shoulder, then pointed to one. I looked up into a wide wicked grin. "You and me, mellon nin," he said. The red palawntir was in his hand, spinning like a globe. "I have an idea."

canaphae-a-tolodh: Legolas
The roar of the engines vanished ahead of us, though we ran as if they were hordes of Mordor. At the edge of hearing, more engines sounded, coming from yet another direction.
"I think, " Bran said, "Kurt was right when he said all of them."

Lorien
They came out of the wall of white like the shadows of warg riders. They could see us no better than we could see them.
And we could hear them.
Tas stood, once more in Elf-form, the dogs behind her, her own stance casual as if she were waiting for a bus.
The bus arrived, she flicked out a hand.
I'd never seen a four-wheeler do a flip before. It landed in a spray of snow, the rider vaulting off, but somehow not as gracefully as other folk I knew with tails. That's when I noticed he didn't have any. He popped to his feet, and Tas' foot planted itself squarely in the middle of his visor. He backflipped and lay still.
Somewhere to my left I heard the sizzle of Liz's bo, a strangled "Arrrghck!" cut short. A silver disk whizzed out of the wall of white and vanished again. Something to my right exploded.
"Now." Zan said, crouched on the snowdrift by me, his feet at my waist, the palawntir dancing with faint lightnings.
I crouched, half-buried in the drift. He raised his hands.

"Her hair was long, her limbs were white," I sang,
and fair she was and free
And in the wind, she went as light
as leaf of linden tree."
Nothing happened. Nothing that I could see anyway. But then, I could only see Zan and the tree I was standing next to, and a lot of snow.
There was a flash of fuschia smoke in the snowy air nearby, then a surprised, "Katzchen!?"
I looked at Zan. He shrugged.
There was the distinct scent of electronics frying. The sound of one engine, then two, then three, dying.
Bamf!
"That..." Nightcrawler spat out something in German which I didn't recognize, and probably didn't want to, "...has opened another Gate! If she harms Katzchen..." His face looked as if he would cheerfully teleport Nazgul Barbie into the Darkforce Dimension and leave her there.
"Zaaaaan." I said.
A smiling Kitty Pryde waved at him and vanished back into the snowstorm. I heard the sounds of more electrical systems going dead, and at least one small explosion. Nightcrawler glowered and crouched to leap to the assistance of his long-time friend and fellow X-Man.
Zan grinned, caught his arm. "Just an illusion, mein freund."
"Eh?" Nighty's face registered astonishment, then relaxed, "A really good one. Too good!"
Bamf!
"Shadowcat?" I said to Zan. Shadowcat who could short out electrical systems by phasing through them.
"Yeah, by the time she's done frying their wheels, they should be easy to..."
Something hurtled out of the white and struck Zan's chest, feet-first. He vanished into the snowdrift he'd been standing on like a dropped anchor. The palawntir sailed through the air and landed just out of my reach. The orc rose and leapt out of the hole he had just made. A featureless black helmet turned toward me.
Then he saw the palawntir.
I didn't think, I just hurled the snowball. The Iceman routine had worked before. The snow splatted all over the helmet's visor, the orc staggered back, wiping at it.
I reached a hand out for the palawntir, it sat maddenly out of reach, I hitched myself up, half out of my hole. My hand closed over it, trying to stuff it down out of sight into the snow. At the same time I sang out the first thing that leapt to mind;
I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been
Blue lightning danced across the red globe, and up my arm. It felt like the time I'd hit the electric fence at Dana's. It crackled, burned. The scroll in my other hand glowed with the same wild light.
I envisioned Storm frying the orc with lightning bolts. What I got was butterflies.
Attack butterflies.
A whole cloud of them, out of nowhere, engulfed the orc's head like pirhanas in a feeding frenzy. The orc waved wildly, staggered back and dropped in the snow, face first.
The butterflies vanished.
I dropped the palawntir in the snow, breathing hard, and floundered up over the edge of my snowhole. I peered down where Zan had gone. "Hey. Zan?" No answer. I dug frantically at the snow, found a leg, a chest. "Zan?" First rule, unconcious victim, don't move them. He was half buried, I had to move him.I dug farther, found his face. "Oh crap." Breathing; no. Heartbeat...covered by too many clothes...find pulse at neck...yeah, there it is. Howthehell do you do mouth to mouth in a snowhole? I strained to haul him out, I had to. I laid him out on the snowdrift and hoped nothing important was broken, like his neck. Tilt his chin, pinch his nose, breathe, breathe again.
He sputtered and opened his eyes. "Gaaaah!"
"Sorry. Shoulda' used mouthwash this morning."
"Nooo." his voice came faint and raspy. "Chest feels like it got hit by a truck."
"Yeah, the orc truck, didn't you see the big "Dodge" logo across the front?"
"I think it said "Ram". Or maybe it was just a dog."
"A Greyhound, you mean." I said, grinning, "Anything hurt?" I'd have to peel half his clothes off and subject him to frostbite as well as cracked ribs to find out myself.
"Fine." he wheezed. " 'Cept for my ribs."
"Don't move then."
"Hey. Where's the orc now?"
I pointed to the inert form on the snow. "Out cold. The attack butterflies got him."
"What?"
"I touched the palawntir when I sang the spell. One where Bilbo's talking about butterflies. I got butterflies. They creamed the orc"
"Whoa!" he stared up at me wide-eyed. A shout nearby caught his attention. "Damn. The illusion." he frowned, waggled his fingers. "Say the verdammt spell again, would ya'? The Shadowcat one. Wait, where's the palawntir?"
I reached for it, hesitated, then grabbed it like a hot rock and shoved it back into his hands. "Should you...?"
"Can't do much else right now."
I sang the spell again.
Zan focused on the palawntir on his chest. His face twisted in concentration...or pain, and the flickering light that danced around the surface of the red globe was fainter. But the smell of frying snowmachine circuitry returned. I crouched by Zan waiting for some other awful thing to materialize out of the snow. I heard more shouts and the odd explosion. A loud, deep voice that sounded Dwarvish, and the screech of metal...perhaps claws...on moving metal. Something that sounded like a sword, perhaps a cutlass...perhaps three of them...slicing through some sort of machinery. The smell of a science experiment gone horribly wrong. The distinct clang of Ian's frisbees hitting something large and metallic, then something more like plastic. A helmet, perhaps. The gaaack!of an orc exclamation cut short. A triumphant howl that wasn't Shenzi or Kodi, yet was still distinctly canine. And female. The roar of more engines coming from a new direction. I searched the scroll, "What else can I use here?" I said to Zan, unrolling the scroll before his nose. What I really wanted were fireballs or icestorms or Summers Brothers force beams or something akin to what Liz had told me D&D wizards carried around.
What I had got was butterflies.
Butterflies that had bagged me an orc. I frowned at the other spells, wondering just exactly it was they would do.
"Lorien." Zan pointed to a spot behind my head. "We need more butterflies."

canaphae-neder: Legolas
We came upon the edges of the fight; a few smoking cycles, an overturned snowmobile slashed as if by a sword...or three, and the distinct smell of sulpher. A few orcs lay half buried in the drifting snow.
"Looks like they've been doing fine without us." Bran said.
"The vis." Jon said.
Bran sang into the wind, and the wall of white swept back as it had before. We could see our foes. They swarmed in the woods around the tight knot of our friends. Many machines lay useless in the snow, and no few orcs. But there were many more.
And now they could see us.
One leapt from his machine as Kurtvagner's sword removed the handlebars. The orc ran toward two figures huddled on the snow. And he had friends.
"Lorien!" I breathed, and raised my bow.

Lorien
Without their bloody machines, the orcs could move as silently as any Elf. These had. Their helmets were missing, and half their blackleather armour was gone. They were just skinny kids now, without their toughguy clothes.
But there were a lot of them.
The first one grinned at us with a mouthful of teeth like a Great White Shark. His yellow eyes fell on the palawntir on Zan's chest.
"Ooooooh crap." Zan said. Faint lightnings played around the edges of his hands. Too faint. His eyes flicked to the palawntir, flickering about as bright as a half-dead firefly.
Four sets of orc eyes followed his gaze. All of them grinned.
I slapped my hand on top of the palawntir and shouted the spell;
"Ere iron was found or tree was hewn
When young was mountain under moon
Ere ring was made or wrought was woe
It walked the forests long ago."
Lightning danced across the red ball and up my arm, only this time it didn't feel like hitting the electric fence. It felt...
...good. Really good.
Something groaned, creaked like ancient hinges, and from overhead swung a great branch. It smacked into Orc One and swept on through his buddies like a great broom. They sprawled thirty feet away and moved no more.
The branch swept back up to its place and stopped, swaying lightly in the wind.
"Whoa." Zan said, staring up into the trees. "Keeeeewl." He lifted the palawntir off his chest and handed it to me.
"Ah, really I think that's your department, Zan." I handed it back to him, still watching the tree above for any more signs of movement.
"Apparently not." His sea-grey eyes studied mine. "This thing enhanced a couple of my illusions, but...whoa..." He rolled the ball on his fingertips.
I waggled the spell scroll. "Maybe it's just this."
"No. You're channeling the energy from the palawntir too. And it's way more powerful than I thought at first." He frowned at the red ball. It glowed in the half-light of the snowstorm like Sauron's eye.
"One ball to rule them all." I said. "Keep it." But my fingers itched to hold it again.

lephae: Legolas
The rest of the orcs fell under the bolts from our bows, or blows from our swords. I found Liz in the thick of things, her bo weaving circles of glittering light, knocking orcs from their mounts one after another.
"Sixteen." she said. Her face looked like that of a wolf who has hunted well.
One more roared by, she swung and missed. I fired and the rider was punched into the snow by the bolt of green light. Two more caught us between them, I set myself against Liz's back and fired. She swung, and hers dropped.
Mine roared by, untouched.
She spun and swung and he fell. "Seventeen!" She crouched and swung again. "Eighteen!" She caught my eyes and gave me a questioning look. I smiled, but would only tell her that her score was better than mine. She grinned back and we took out the next one together.
A few roared off before we could fell them, the sound of their engines fading into the distance. We gathered around Lorien and Zan, Ian kneeling in the snow, running his hands over the fallen Elf. The familar green fire danced around his hands and, at last, the young Elf rolled to his feet. He looked around.
"Hey, you didn't leave any for me."

Yo Ho Ho, Me Hearties...
lephae-a-min: Legolas
"Legolas, Is that it then, is that all there is?" Liz said to me. Her face was flushed with excitement and her bo was still at the ready. "Do you see any more?"
"No." I told her.
"For now, that is all we will see of the orcs, I think." Jon said. "Though our villainess may have a few in reserve. But if her magics, or her trackers tell her where we are going, she will know orcs are useless in water."
"Yeah." Bran said, "They swim in exactly the way fish don't."
"Kinda' like bricks." Ian added.
"So do I." Lorien said.
Tas blurred, shifted and reappeared in her true form. She handed a heavily padded vest to Lorien. "Maybe you should put this on under your parka."
"Man, those things are like, a hundred bucks at the kayak shop!" Liz said, eyeing the strange vest hungrily.
"You can have it when we get out of the quarry." Lorien said. "'Cause that's the last time you'll get me out on the water."
I turned suddenly for something had rumbled up from the edge of hearing and was screaming in my ears, though neither Liz nor Lorien nor Ian nor Doc seemed to notice it. The dogs had leapt to attention, their ears pricked. Then they howled in sympathy with the strange sound.
"What is it Legolas?" Liz said to me.
Around us the heavy white flakes were beginning to thin. I answered; "I heard the deep rumble their women make when they talk over great distances. And something else."
Bran knelt nearby, one hand against a tree-bole, head cocked like a bird, listening with more than his ears. "I've heard it before. But you never hear it in their presence. A kind of weeeeeeee heeeeeeeh heeeeeeeeh hheeeee!" His voice shrieked up into the sounds Men cannot hear.
"Sounds like the X-Jet." Kurtvagner said, eyebrows wrinkling as if it was an all too familiar sound. "With engine trouble."
"Dysfunctional tardis," Lorien said.
"Nooooooo, more like a functional one, I think." Bran said.
"If we go back there," Jon said, "we will find no trace of them, or their machines."
"How?" I asked.
"They have their secrets." Liz and Jon said together.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Liz frowned at the tall Elf. "Shoulda' dragged one of those O.R.C.s back here and pried his head open for a couple of those secrets."
Jon said, "It would not have been possible."
"You never really answered my question." Liz said to Bran.
"Which one?"
"Can Dragonkin ... or rather orcs... open Gates? I mean, besides to wherever it is they go when they're not off-roading, wreaking havoc, or running errands for Nazgul Barbie. Like...new gates...to...ah...other places?"
Bran's eyes darkened, like deep water, "Why?"
"There's... there's something... familiar. Those crests. The feathers."
"Feathers?" Lorien said, and a sudden look of understanding came to her face.
"Feathers?" the Ravenkin said. He glanced from Liz to Lorien to Liz.

Lorien
Feathers. Blue-green feathers marked with purple. A brazier burning with an evil smelling concoction of herbs. Tossing those feathers into the fire.
"Why would Nazgul Barbie use orc feathers as part of a spell?" I said.
Jon turned to me, fast as a falcon, "What?"
"Yeah." Liz said. "I remember the feathers really clear now that I've seen them up close on those orcs. The big feathers that were notched and clipped, the crests on their heads."
"The ones that mark their rank and status in the clan." Bran said.
"That's what I thought too." I said.
"Gotta be. The ones I got from Dana were notched like that."
"The ones you got from Dana,"Jon began..."
"...and there's nothing in the north American woods, or any pet shop, marked like that, with those weird purple shadings." Liz said.
"True." Bran said to her.
Jon moved. Two quick strides like a leopard hunting brought him before me, he looked down into my eyes, "Lorien. Are you sure?"
I stared up into ice blue eyes that were probably about a thousand years old. It was like looking into a bottomless crevasse in a glacier. I took a step back.
Bran came up behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder. "Easy, mellon nin." He shot me an apologetic look.
"For how long have we been Gatesingers ?" Jon snapped, "And we have never heard of such a thing... someone who is not Dragonkin using Dragonkin feathers to open a Dragongate.!"
Bran stepped between Jon and me, looked at me with deep sky eyes, "Try to remember. Picture it again..."
I did, it was much easier this time; Bran's eyes, the color of Nightcrawler's skin, had some of the same softness. The images danced across my memory, and those dark blue eyes widened.
"Whoa." Bran said in a very quiet voice. He looked up at Jon, "Yep. Orc feathers." He paused, "Not precisely Dragonkin... you'd never get feathers from a true Dragonkin. Orc feathers. Pawned for a new motorcycle or jet ski probably."
"Well," Liz said, "Then all we need to do is catch Nazgul Barbie, get her to reveal the counterspell, call up a couple of your old Dragonkin buddies, snag a few of their most important body parts, or those of their wayward youth, and send Nighty and Legolas home. Should be a piece of double-death-by-chocolate cake!"

lephae-a tad: Legolas
The curtain of snow paled and fell back. The air lightened from grey to silver. Somewhere above us an early afternoon sun shone above the blanket of clouds. The dogs continued to run, light and fast, skiers and Tas breaking trail ahead of them. We found the sweeping curves of route 441, running north along the east bank of the River. A snowmobile that did not belong to an orc had been there before us, and we could stretch out and run the last mile. We no longer hid our trail, we were not trying to elude an army of orcs. Bran took to the air now, sailing ahead of us on the wind, wheeling back with news he had gathered with his own eyes, and with those of other birds who had come out of hiding after the storm.
The land was empty as far as he could see. Even from a hilltop I saw no more than many snowed in houses, a distant snowplow, and someone playing with a snowmobile.
The orcs were gone.
Ahead of us a familiar flag marked the end of a snowed road to the left. The bright red stood out against the snow, its white diagonal slash marking this as a place divers could practice their skills by doing things like carving pumpkins and decorating yule trees at the bottom of the clear, cold lake. The road led down past the dive shop, where Tas teleported all of our sled dogs but herself into the safety of the closed shop. The road wound down through the woods toward the River. It ran out of the woods and past some dilapidated buildings that had once been part of the quarry operation, when it was digging limestone from the earth. For a long time the machines had been silent, and the pumps that kept the great hole dry had stilled long ago, letting the groundwater reclaim the huge scar, and turn it into a deep lake. White cliffs still towered over the water, a shade of turquoise green that looked as if it belonged to warmer waters much farther south.
We stopped on the road where it ran along the high side of the quarry cliffs. Bran peered down into the turquoise hole, unfrozen, despite the biting winter cold all about.
"What if she doesn't find us?" Lorien asked, "What if we kicked orc butt so thoroughly she just packs up her magic wand and goes home?"
"She'll find us." Jon said, glancing at me. "We seem to have a lot of things she wants back."

Lorien
Bran stood staring out into the water, singing softly under his breath. "...bring me that horizon...da da da, da da da, da da da daaaaaah...and really bad eggs..."
"Is it my imagination, or is it getting warmer?" I said.
"Yo ho ho, me hearties...get your bikinis out girls," he said. "And save me some rum." He had shapeshifted again, and now was wearing a baggy white pirate shirt and thigh-high boots. And a broad, colorful Caribbean headscarf. And several locks of blue-grey hair were beaded outrageously.
I raised my camera, and took a shot of him doing his best Captain Jack Sparrow grin.
"We're about to do some serious gunkholing." Captain Jack Raven said.
"Huh?" Liz said.
"Cruising about in shoal waters or small coves." I told her. I studied the white cliffs towering close on all sides, at the far end of the green lake one small gravelly beach sloped down from the entrance road to the water. We stood on a narrow grassy slope on the far side of the lake, one that led down to a floating dock. Those were the only two approaches to the lake. Not a particularly big lake, and starboard of our position, I could see a shoal of rocks through the clear water. In the other direction was a sunken grove of trees that had grown there before the quarry flooded. Not a lot of maneuvering room if Zan was doing what I thought he was doing.
Zan stood below me on the floating dock, twirling the palawntir and frowning. Legolas and Liz and Doc were beside him, wrestling a long pole they had scrounged from the old quarry building. Another one like it already stood near the other end of the dock, shrouded and braced with rope to keep it vertical. "Is there some kind of plan? Or are we just making this up as we go along?" I asked Bran.
"Plan? Elves and plan?" Ian's voice came from behind me, "Now there's two words you almost never hear together in the same sentence."
Bran gave him a wide smirk, then looked back out into the middle of the turquoise water. He kept humming. It sounded like more of the Pirates soundtrack.
I peeled out of my pooka parka and looked for a safe place to put it. A moment later I pulled off my sweater. Nightcrawler came and stood beside me, watching Bran curiously.
Below me something rumbled, a great ripple spread from the dock out into the lake.
And there was a tall ship where the dock had been. Not just any old tall ship; a swift looking 70 foot brig; headsails like the flight feathers of a hawk, her foremast sporting square course, top and topgallant sails, her mainmast hung too with top and topgallant sails, and one great wing of mainsail reaching to her stern. She looked awfully familiar.
"Hey, isn't that the Interceptor?" I asked. "The one they blew up in Pirates?" I raised my camera and took a shot. Two. Three.
Bran's grin widened. "It's the Lady Washington. Before they made her up as the Interceptor. A lot like the one I was on back in 17..."
"Na aear, na aear, myl lain nallol, i sul ribiel, a i falf loss reviol..." To the sea, to the sea, the white gulls are crying, the wind is blowing, the white foam is flying.
Bran turned in surprise and stared at Nightcrawler. "Since when do you speak Elvish?!"
"It's from elvish dot org. The Sindarin translation..."
"...of Legolas' sea song in Return of the King. Yeah, I know. Unglaublich!" Bran said.
Nightcrawler grinned at him, then down at the ship, one hand fiddling with the hilt of a cutlass. "Bring me that horizon. And really bad eggs."
"And what are we going to do with that?" I asked Bran, pointing at our brig, then the limestone cliffs that closed in on all sides."Fire forks at Nazgul Barbie with the cannons?"
Bran just grinned. The two of them, Bran and Kurt, looked like kids at Christmas.
I shook my head. "And how is she going to get close enough for us to trap her?"
"This." Zan said. The air wavered, hiccupped, and a horde of orcs jostled down the dock, sweeping us up and aiming for the ship's gangway.
"Hey, what?" The orc behind me definitely had far too tight a grip on me. I elbowed him, and stepped on his foot for good measure.
"OW!" he said in Nightcrawler's voice. "I'm one of the real ones!"
"Oh. Oooops. Sorry about the foot."
"It wasn't my foot."
"Oh. Sorry about the tail." I now stood near the gunnels in the midst of a horde of orcs, precise illusory copies of the ones we had just fought. Some of them were real; two had bows hidden in their off-road leathers, one was shorter than the rest and his gloves would sprout nearly-adamantium claws, and one, hidden in the midst of it all, back near the wheel, had a tight grip on a dark shiny red motorcyle helmet. Liz stood a few yards away, her bo collapsed and tucked under her pirate shirt. The orc behind her had a particularly annoyed scowl. Legolas knew of the Beren legend from the Silmarillion, in which Finrod the Elvenking changes his party into the likenesses of orcs, the better to sneak into Morgoth's stronghold. And he knew our O.R.C.s were not the evil folk of Middle-earth.
Despite this Legolas did not like being turned into an orc, even if it was only an illusion.
Not even if the black leather looked hot on him.
Jon was somewhere behind me. I shot a comment in his general direction, "Maybe it's time to send up those flares."
Somebody chuckled. It sounded Dwarvish.
"She will come." Jon said.
"Before I'm grounded for eternity?" Liz said.
We'd been there for hours, I knew all the spells on my scroll without looking. I had taken pics of the brig, of the Elves, the fake O.R.C.s. The last few pics looked like The Pirates of Helm's Deep. The sun had begun to burn through the cloud cover. Bran's weather wizarding had worked. It was getting downright tropical in here. And my feet were still clad...and melting...in the mukluks Mom had got me last Christmas. The ones you could climb Mount Everest in. The ones I'd been wearing when Nazgul Barbie kidnapped me on the way home from the barn somewhere in the beginning of the First Age. I had shed everything but my t-shirt, and jeans and the personal flotation device Tas had manifested for me. Liz had somehow got Bran to make her a pirate shirt and a headscarf. She looked like she belonged there on the deck of a tall ship. I was just hoping I stayed on the deck.
A vulture wheeled out of the woods above us, hit the mutated air over the quarry and wobbled.
"Sorry dude." came Bran's voice, and one of the orcs made a gesture at the air overhead. The vulture tilted on the fresh breeze and wheeled off.
Just over the treeline to the west, lay the Susquehanna River. A flock of birds, dark against the pale sky, circled up from there. They wailed over our private tropical lagoon, stark white against the turquoise water. A few dropped down to take a closer look at us.
"Mine?"
"Mine? Mine, mine."
"Mine, mine, mine, mine!" the gulls shouted.
"Guess they're wondering if we have any hotdogs, like the divers usually do." Bran said.
"Maybe you could tell them to go find Nazgul Barbie and bring her here, like before the next millennium." Liz said.
"Maybe they're her Crebain from Dunland." I said.
One sat on the yardarm above me and made a great splot. It missed me by inches.
"Nah." Bran said. "She couldn't convince a roach to work for her."
"Mine? Mine mine Minemineminemine!" they wailed.
One of the orcs leaned forward past Liz and followed their wheeling flight with his eyes.
Oooooohhhhhhcrap!
It was Legolas.
"Ohcrapohcrapohcrap!" I whispered.
"Was?" a German accented orc said in my ear.
"What was that little song you were singing awhile back, something about white gulls?"
"Achmist! The Sea-longing!"
The orc watching the gulls was leaning over the railing now, staring at the sky. Liz turned, saw him, and shot me a look that said Middle-earth is so screwed.
I stared back, What do we do... I mouthed. Liz's eyes flicked to a point behind my head, and I felt a hand on my shoulder.
"We'll burn that bridge when we get to it." Nightcrawler said. He tilted his head toward the steep slope above us, "Listen."
I heard the distinct roar of an engine.
Liz turned toward the sound. Legolas kept watching the sky.
"Sounds like a snowmobile." Nightcrawler said.
"Five of them." Doc added. He began to add something about the engine sizes and model years but Jon cut him off.
"She's here." Jon said.

...and Really Bad Eggs
Lorien
The snowmobiles, manned by two orcs each, skewed to a halt on the slope just above us. No mean feat, as they'd needed to slog through the mud and snowmelt for the last hundred yards, courtesy of Raven Weather Wizarding Inc. The hot pink snowsuit stood out like Airhead Blonde Barbie among Hell's Angels, though a good deal of the putrid pink was splattered with mud now. And Barbie did not look pleased. She dismounted. The orcs stared at us. I tried to remember what Jon'd said about them; Orcs don't use weapons. At least the traditional ones don't. And the orcs we'd met before hadn't had any. And their lack of swimming ability made it unlikely that they would storm the ship.
I just hoped these weren't hiding shotguns up their sleeves. Barbie slithered down the rest of the slope to the part of the dock that wasn't currently a brig. Her perfect pink snowsuit picked up some more melted mud, her expression changed from a look of triumph to one of annoyance. "Why," she said to the tallest orc on the ship, "are you on a boat?"
Behind me an annoyed German accent whispered, "It is NOT a boat, it is a ship, it is only a boat if you can put it on a ship!"
I elbowed him into silence.
Barbie unzipped the snowsuit halfway, "And why is it so damn hot in here?"
The orc who was Bran rumbled something that sounded orcish, then added, "They retreated here, thinking the water would protect them. Their magic is at work here, but we were faster. We have them." He stepped forward and caught Liz's arm, shoving her forth so Nazgul Barbie could see. "The others too." he added.
"What about my guys?" she said, glaring, "The Elves? The dark-haired one and the blue one?"
"They took more restraining, but we have them."
"The..." she frowned, hesitating, "red glass ball." There was something in her expression that reminded me of Gollum reaching for the Ring. Something...hungry. And I remembered the feeling of power I'd had the last time I'd used it. Yeah. Hunger. Like the Ring.
And I wondered how effective my spells would be without it.
"Perhaps it is among their gear. We did not look. We waited for you."
"Good." She tippy-tapped down the wooden dock, and glared up at the ship. Obediently a gangplank slid forth. She walked up it like she was walking onto a yacht. Her eye fell on me. I felt Nightcrawler's hand tighten reassuringly on my shoulder. I glanced at Liz. The orc who was Legolas was still behind her, no longer eyeing up the gulls.
At least for now.
Nazgul Barbie reached out a perfectly gloved hand, closed it on my chin. "Outer Mongolia. Noooo, not far enough. Maybe scenic Antarctica."
I wrenched loose. A breeze touched my face, the sails above me luffed, I felt the ship move under me. Now what? We needed to be farther out in the water. Farther from the orcs on shore. And more in the midst of the magic. She was focused on me, not Bran or Jon. I needed to keep her attention. Keep her talking. What I really wanted right now was a fireball, or the ability to teleport her butt to Uzbekistan. Or for Zan to have made those six deck cannons functional. I had offered to use the attack butterflies, or something else from the scroll, but Doc had warned me against it. Not yet. Not now. Not one-on-one with Barbie.
"So, before you ship me to scenic Antarctica, perhaps you'd like to tell us about your hidden plan for world domination?"
She actually laughed. "You really have been watching waaaaay too many old Batman reruns. Why would I want to rule the world? What a pain in the ass!" she leaned a little closer, an overwhelming waft of perfume crawled up my nose and into my sinuses. My eyes started to water. I wondered how she'd react if I sneezed a big one in her face.
"What do you want, then?" I said.
"Just a couple of verrrry...hot...guys." she looked even more predatory than Tas and Shenzi combined.
"Wouldn't it have been a lot easier just to kidnap Orlando Bloom or something?"
"He's kind of recognizable. Hard to take him to the beach, or to dinner without being mobbed. Or jailed. Besides. I like his movies. I'd like to see more."
"There are Elves here, you know. Why Legolas and Nightcrawler?"
"I know them. I like them. A lot. And if I...took...one from here, he'd have friends, wouldn't he? Friends who would perhaps, find him, and separate him from me." her eyes went dark as storm clouds and I had a feeling she was speaking from experience. Her hand tightened on my face.
A black gloved hand fell on her wrist and loosened her grip. She looked up, startled, looked past me at the orc behind me.
Ohcrap, Nightcrawler, don't blow it now...
She squinted, as if trying to see through a fog...
..or an illusion.
"So," I tried to get her attention back, "had a little bad luck with guys in the past, eh?"
She looked at me, then past me to the ship's rail, now definitely farther from shore than it had been. Above her the sails expanded with a definite breeze. I could have sworn I heard one of the orcs humming more of the Pirates soundtrack.
"What?!" she shrieked, "Why are we..." she stared back at Nighty and her eyes widened. A hand shot out, wreathed in dark lightnings.
On shore the other orcs stood up, watching.
"but just as he thought his dinner was caught
he found his hands had hold of naught" I sang.
Nightcrawler dodged, the lightnings missed, and three cutlasses sang out of their sheaths.
Not a one of them touched Nazgul Barbie.
Then everything happened at once.
A lightning wreathed hand moved again. The lightnings struck my pooka life-vest, sizzled around it, and it fell smoking onto the deck.
A bolt of green light hit Barbie square in the head. Or should have. She flicked out a hand and it flowed around her like water around a rock.
A shorebound orc unholstered something from his seat, with a move straight out of the Old West. Something boomed through the rigging, a shroud to the mainmast snapped, splinters flew.
Half a dozen orcs...the E.L.F. ones...hit the deck, and bits of mast and rigging spattered into the lagoon. Nightcrawler shoved me behind the broad bole of the foremast, at the foot of the fiferail, on the opposite side from the onshore orcs.
Another bolt of green fire shot forth from Legolas' bow, this time it struck the orc with the shotgun. He fell, steaming, and his gang erupted into action.
On deck, Nazgul Barbie plowed through illusory orcs. They parted like the Red Sea to let her by, then turned on us. Bolts of icy light shot from Jon's bow, mowing them down, but not once touching Nazgul Barbie. The rest of the real orcs rose from the deck and joined the melee. Tas threw mad punches and kicks port, starboard and abaft. Doc slashed a hole through the orc hordes with his claws. Ian's frisbees winged out, ricocheted off a few real orcs on shore, and sailed back to him. Liz leapt to Legolas' side and fended off illusory orcs with her bo. Jon turned his bow toward the real orcs on shore.
Legolas stood by the gunnels, firing at shorebound orcs. They ducked, dodged, leapt behind trees, and no few returned fire, with weapons they had hidden in their machines. Shotgun blasts blew through rigging, knocked splinters out of masts and yardarms, blew holes through our nice new sails. Legolas stood as if on the wall at Helm's Deep blasting snowmachines and the odd orc with the green lightning from his bow. Legolas' fighting style was honed in a pre-gunpowder world. He knew about guns, of course, he'd seen enough movies, read all of Liz's comic collection and the odd newspaper headline. But he was still thinking like an Elf of Mirkwood. "Legolas! Stay down!" I yelled as Liz dragged him behind the gunnels with her.
"You too, liebling!" Nightcrawler crouched over me, one hand keeping me firmly squashed into the deck.
Like that would do any good. The ship, and its railing was mainly an illusion. Yeah, and the mast I was cowering behind too.
Something zinged and splattered against the railing where Legolas had been standing. Zan had said the palawntir had enhanced some of my own magic as well as his... and the centipedes of doom had been illusions and had mass and bite. So maybe...
...and maybe the quarry magic itself was finally kicking in.
Legolas popped up over the sturdy rail and fired.
On shore an entire snowmobile lifted and blew into bits.
More gunfire boomed from shore, and ricocheted off the apparently quite solid sides of the ship.
Legolas stayed hunkered down behind the gunnels, popping up to fire and duck again, like a cowboy in an old western. Or maybe more like one of the Indians. Behind him, illusory orcs were falling from the low blows of an unseen bo.
We needed to be farther from shore, and our weather wizard was up to his eyeballs in orcs. Bran leapt and spun like a bird in flight, wheeling his sword in circles of blue light through the hordes on deck, swinging down from brief perches on stay or shroud to slash illusory orcs into shreds of skittering light. Nightcrawler still crouched over me, shielding me with his body. I planted a hand on his chest and shoved him aside enough to shout up at the sails;
"i sul ribiel a i falf loss reviol!" I sang. The wind is blowing, the white foam is flying.
The sails above us luffed, lifted and swelled. The ship began to move faster.
An onshore orc fired a parting shot, too far now. It was answered by green fire and the orc went down.
Dead ahead rose the white limestone cliffs of the quarry. I looked up at the full sails. "Hey, who's steering this thing?" I yelled.
"Ach!" 'Crawler exclaimed. And vanished.
Meanwhile, Nazgul Barbie was moving fast. She wasn't heading for the rail. She wasn't going overboard, not even with our help. And she wasn't headed for either of 'her' Elves. She was headed abaft.
Why? What...?
The palawntir. It had to be the palawntir. I remembered the look on her face when she'd asked about it. And the taste it had left in my hands. Hunger.
If she gets it back, it's going to be like Sauron with the Ring.
I scrambled to my feet, elbowing my way through the orcs. A moment later the ship lurched and swung hard aport, like a horse yanked up short on its lead. The deck rolled and tossed beneath me. Nightcrawler reappeared beside me, catching me as I tried to find my sea legs and failed.
"Whatthehell?" I said.
"I dropped the port anchor." he said. "It worked in the movie."
The ship rocked, rolled and righted itself. It squatted now, dead in the water in the middle of the lagoon.
"We need to get to Zan, that's where Nazgul Barbie is going, I'm sure!"
Kurt nodded and plunged into the horde of orcs, with me right on his tail. He swatted them out of existence as he went. I sang out a spell, hoping it would aid him;
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.
Nightcrawler's eyes and his right-hand sword traded blows with three orcs to starboard. His tail fenced with two astern. His port sword came down on another dark helmet, and was met with blue fire.
"Crawler! It's me!" Bran yelled, his blue sword of light sizzling against a cutlass. Beside him another orc raised a silver disk that had once been a hubcap.
"Ach! Sorry!" Nightcrawler said.
Bran spat out something in no language I knew, and his orc illusion fell away along with the one disguising Nightcrawler and Ian.
"She's after the palawntir!" I told Bran.
"What? Why?"
"One ball to rule them all!" I told him, "When Zan and I used it..."
"Zan and...you?"
"It's more powerful than he thought. If she gets hold of it..."
His eyes read mine and widened. "Come on!" Capn' Bran Raven gestured silently to Ian. Ian made a quick gesture in return and moved aft, clearing a temporary swath through the orcs with his frisbees. Bran reached for a line belayed alongside fifty others on the pinrail, slashed it loose with his sword and swung in the general direction of Nazgul Barbie's bleachblonde head. Above him a yard leaped like a loose horse.
"Come, liebling," Nighty said, grabbing the freed belaying pin that had held Bran's line. He bounced the heavy pin off an orc's head, and scooped me up, swinging up effortlessly into the ratlines, even hauling me, Pudge-muffin, with him.
Below, Legolas headed for Liz, swinging her bo in circles of fire. Tas, back in her true form, was teaching orcs the art of swimming.
The fake ones didn't swim any better than the real ones would have.
A hole in the action resolved itself into Doc, slashing cheerfully away, orcs disintegrating like villains in a video game.
Nazgul Barbie plowed aft through illusory orcs like a heat seeking missle. Doc, Ian, Jon and the rest hacked their way through the hordes on deck with vehemence. They were not making much progress down the mere seventy feet or so of deck; the orcs didn't seem to be thinning.
"I don't remember this many fake orcs!" I said, looking down from our perch in the mainmasts' ratlines.
"There weren't!" Nightcrawler said. "She's making more somehow!"
Zan was nowhere to be seen. But he was the illusionist, he could change his disguise as needed. He could be anywhere, be anybody.
"If she gets the palawntir..." I said.
"...deep trouble." Nighty said, nodding at the water below us, deep, turquoise, the bottom somewhere a hundred feet below.
Yeah, deep trouble. And that creep fried my pooka pfd.
"Do you actually have a plan?" I said to Nighty.
"Plan?" Nighty said.
"Plan?" Bran echoed, swinging from his halyard.
"Ach! Elves!" I said.
Something rumbled, way down at the edge of hearing.
"Whatthehell?" Bran said, he reached for one of the mainmast's port side braces and perched there on the slanting line.
I clutched Nightcrawler's neck as the whole ship heeled hard aport, our perch snapping like the end of Dana's lunge whip.
"Whoa!" Bran said, much nearer the water than a moment ago. He wrapped himself around the brace as the ship snapped back the other way.
Below us something moved in the clear green water. Something rising toward the surface.
Some thing big. Really really big.
"This is not the Creature From The Black Lagoon." I said. "This is a freshwater lake. An old quarry to be precise. There is nothing in here bigger than a largemouth bass."
"Yeah," Bran said, "Tell that to him!"
"Quarry." Nightcrawler said, "That's like a mine. Mines of Moria, Watcher in the Water. Any of that ring a bell?"
A huge tentacle snaked out of the water, slithered over the gunnels and reached for Nazgul Barbie.
"Uh oh." Bran said.
"You have a gift for understatement, mein freund." Nightcrawler said.
Something like an algae-slimed rock, or perhaps a smaller, less lovely version of the Great Barrier Reef, neared the surface. More tentacles shot out, spraying the deck with water and goo of unknown origins. A distinct smell of sulphur and decay filled the air. A few orcs went down. Nazgul Barbie slipped, caught herself by grabbing an orc, then a line. She raised a hand, dark lightnings fried another tentacle reaching for her head.
"Zan, you idiot!" Bran shouted into the mob of orcs on deck.
More tentacles reached for Barbie and were deflected, then fried.
"Wherethehell is he?" Bran said, scanning the deck below.
"You're telling me that's his?" I pointed at the multiple tentacles slithering over the deck, making the entire ship list heavily to starboard. A few began wriggling up the rigging. On the other side of the ship, Doc looked up from a pile of orcs and saw a tentacle snaking toward him. He flattened an orc and leaped for the tentacle, claws extended.
Barbie stood now, dripping quarry bottom goo from her perfect pink snowsuit, wriggling a hand like grasping tentacles.
"Wunderbar!" Bran said. "She's got control of Zan's illusion now. Problem is, he's so good, I can't tell where he is!"
Clinging to Nightcrawler's neck I sang out a spell;
"Ah, ah...
Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away
Tom's in a hurry now, evening will follow day."
Tentacles bigger than Old Man Willow's roots continued to writhe over the deck. A few hesitated and fell limp as cooked noodles. More rose from the depths of the quarry to take their place. "Aaaaagh! It's not working!" Perhaps if I had the palawntir. My hands twitched. Itched. Hungered.
"Liebling, look!" Below us, by the wheel, one of the orcs stood contemplating a dark helmet in one hand. He was not going with the flow of the others.
And he was a bit shorter than most of them.
"Zan!"
"Ja, the light around him is different from the fake orcs."
"What? Bran can't even tell."
"I can see parts of the spectrum you can't. How do you think I see in the dark?"
"Can you put me down and grab him?"
"Put you where?"
"Anywhere." Yeah, right. We were halfway up the ratlines of the ninty-foot mainmast, on a ship a giant economy sized Watcher in the Water was attempting to eat. I climb in exactly the way squirrels don't, and there was a lot of very deep water below me. Water full of writhing tentacles.
"You get Zan, let Bran distract her. I have a spell or two that might help."
"Here," Nighty said, "Hold onto this." he wove my arms through the spaces in the ratlines, stuck a leg, then the other through another space, tucked my feet through, and closed my hands on itchy tarred rope. "I won't be far." Then he was gone.

lephae-a-nel: Legolas
The woman was more powerful than we had thought. She deflected the blows of our weapons as if they were but toys. And the orcs she had come with had weapons of the kind Men of that world used; short, heavy and unlovely, like a crossbow, but filled with the Fire of Isengard. They were nearly too far away to be effective, but I felt their sting.
The great hole that had been a quarry of Men thrummed with the power of earth and water. The River flowed nearby, tying those energies to the Great Bay beyond, and to the Sea. Mirzithan's illusions gained strength here. And the Palawntir magnified them. The illusions were real, solid. The wood of the ship's rail deflected most of the orc fire. The broad sails caught real wind. The sheets and shrouds and braces would have held all of us aloft.
But those magics were being turned against us too. Nazgul Barbie multiplied the orcs, and turned them to her own use, much as she had twisted Zan's magic in our battle at her house. And she sniffed for the Palawntir like a Nazgul sniffing for the One Ring.
Lorien raised a bit of wind with her spell, and the ship moved. I felled the last of the orcs on shore. But Nazgul Barbie was lost in the pressing crowd on deck.
As fast as we flattened illusory orcs, more took their place. Beside me Liz's bo wove circles of fire and light, but the orcs came ever thicker.
"Crunch all you want, she'll make more." she said grimly.
"Indeed. This is her doing."
"Somebody has to fry her brains. If they can get close enough!"
"Aloft!" I said to her, pointing up into the masts, tall as the trees of Mirkwood.
"Won't you be a better target for her there?"
"I think she is not concerned with me right now." We swung up, and could see the swarming deck in detail.
Then the ship rocked as if it had struck a reef. I looked down and saw the reef, it looked as if a piece of the bottom had risen from the deepest hole, bringing with it decay and stench. It reached tentacles the size of tree boles across the deck, leaving a trail of slime. First it reached for Nazgul Barbie, and I realized it must be one of Zan's illusions too. But she blasted it with her lightnings, then turned it on us as well.
The masts and lines whipped as if in a great storm. The ship listed hard. I saw others; Morathradon, Lorien, Brannan the Ravenkin, and our villainess converging on the ship's stern.
Liz paused, swayed with the grace of a bird on one of the slender shrouds to the mainmast. "There she is."
"Our weapons won't touch her."
Liz grinned suddenly, "Yeah, but I bet we can."

Lorien
Bran swooped down on Nazgul Barbie's head with all the grace of Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp combined. Hoping to keep Barbie from frying Bran, I sang out;
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising,
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
From his place on the starboard rail, Ian's silver disks flew, distracting her further.
"Yeaaaaagh!" Bran yelled, catching her armpits with his legs as he swung by. He must have underestimated his velocity, or the strength of the line, or Barbie's actual weight.
"Gaaah!" The line parted and they both tumbled across the deck, rolling through orcs like a bowling ball.
Ow! Well, that might count as a distraction. Bran popped to his feet and spun Nazgul Barbie in a mad dance under the mainsail. She shot out a hand and fired lightning the color of a train wreck. His blue sword flashed and parried. A silver disk, edged with green light, a disk that looked like it might have once been a pot lid, ricocheted off her shoulders.
Barbie and Bran both stood stunned and smoking.
"You know," she said, "you're kind of cute when you're mad..." she raised a hand.
"The landlord keeps a little dog
that is mighty fond of jokes
When there's good cheer among the guests
he cocks an ear at all the jests
and laughs until he chokes."
Barbie gasped, sputtered. Her hand fell as Bran hit the deck, and rolled out of the way.
The ship rocked, the rigging whipped. Forward, Tas and the others were hacking through tentacles the size of trees as well as the odd orc.
Abaft, by the wheel, there was a sudden fuschia flash, the faint sound of imploding air lost in the melee. The smallest orc looked up, startled, then vanished in a burst of fuschia flame and smoke. A moment later I heard a 'bamf 'above me, then Nightcrawler and Zan swung down to land lightly in my ratlines.
Zan clung to the line, panting, "Let's go to the quarry, he says. She can't use our magics he says, well guess what Fearless Leader! She bloody well can!" Zan gestured and his disguise fell away. His red hair looked like it had weathered a hurricane, and there were lines of fear and worry around his eyes, eyes gone the color of a cold rain at sea. He swayed in the ratlines, Nightcrawler braced himself behind him, steadying him.
"I've got nothing I can hit her with, she's turned my orcs. Grabbed my Watcher. I was gonna try a few flying Nazgul, maybe the Millenium Falcon, hell, maybe even the Death Star!"
"Nein, nein, mein freund!" Nightcrawler said, eyes wide.
"Yeah, really." Zan's face looked drained.
For all that Zan was capable of, he was still a kid. Just a kid. One in over his head right now. "Let me try it." I heard myself say.
"Here." he said and thrust the palawntir at me like a hot potato.
Below me, Bran had regained his feet and was dancing in desperate circles, fending off Nazgul Barbie's lightning blasts with a wheel of light from his circling sword. Barbie paused and looked up. Her eyes widened as she saw the red flash of the palawntir. She gestured.
A couple of orcs started climbing after us. Then two more. A few of the Watcher's tentacles slithered after them.
"Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away
Tom's in a hurry now, evening will follow day."
Like that would work any better this time. I tried it anyway, none of the other spells seemed to fit.
Above me, the topgallant sail suddenly went limp as a couple of its sheets ceased to hold it in place. The reason for its sudden demise swung down on the poop deck; Legolas and Liz. Two pairs of booted feet nailed Barbie right in the solar plexus. She vanished into a throng of orcs. The tentacles slipped and slithered back over the side into the water.
"YES!" I yelled.
"Oh crappola." Zan said in a very small voice, his eyes going to a spot behind my head.
Nightcrawler snarled, crouched, leapt straight over my head, all three cutlasses whirling like a Cuisinart. The ratlines spranged and tossed. I grabbed desperately and wrapped myself up like a caterpiller in a cocoon, following Nightcrawler's flight with the spell I'd used for Bran;
"Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising,
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing"
This time I sang it in German.
Below me a couple of orcs hit the deck, falling as if from a great height, and vanished into mist. A huge piece of tentacle fell beside them and disintegrated into slime. I heard a satisfied exclamation in German.
The palawntir, wedged between my bosom and the rope rigging began to slip. "Zaaaaaan!"
He reached.
Too late.
It fell.
Nazgul Barbie rose out of the thinning throng of orcs on deck. She swayed a bit, like Capn' Jack Sparrow with too much rum. She looked up to see the big red ball headed for her nose.
I couldn't see Bran anywhere.
The loose topgallant snapped and spun as someone freed another line; someone swung by in a great swoop like an osprey on a fish. A hand flashed out and the palawntir fell into it.
Legolas.
"Yahoooo!" I whooped, and sang out a spell to aid him, a line from Treebeard's Lore of Living Things;
"Thoron vaeg-heneb!" Eagle sharp-eyed.
Below, on deck, Liz shoved her way past the last few orcs, smacked aside a great slimy tentacle with her bo, and delivered a neat palm strike to Barbie's head. She reeled, then shook it off, and grabbed for Liz.
"Carpholch vaethor!" I shouted. Boar the warrior, that was Liz, alright. Liz ducked and plowed into Barbie like a berserk boar.
Legolas reached the end of his rope, and swung out over the turquoise depths of the quarry. A few tentacles reached up waving perilously near his legs.
"Cabor i chab!" Frog that jumps. What I really needed was monkey, but apparently Ents had never met monkeys, there wasn't a rhyme for one. Anyway, all I could picture in the monkey department was an undead zombie one in pirate garb.
Legolas swung up out of the way, the line snapped him back over the ship. He juggled the ball frantically.
It seemed juggling is something woodland princes do not learn much about.
And I could not think of a spell to help...
"Gaaaah!" He said. The ball plummeted to its doom.
Below me Nazgul Barbie snapped out a front kick. Liz backed up a stride, eyes crossed as Barbie's foot passed within inches of her nose.
"Megli faroth vaed!" Bear, hunter, skilled.
Liz swung hard and Barbie reeled back a few yards.
Below Legolas, Tas reached out a hand and caught the palawntir, kicking aside fake orcs all the while. One of them barreled into her from astern and she sprawled headfirst into his buddies.
The palawntir sailed up, and up...
Liz delivered a mean spinning back kick. Barbie ducked. Mostly.
A couple of tentacles reached for the sailing palawntir. One made contact.
Slime does not make for a good catcher's mitt. The palawntir slithered, slipped and continued on its flight path.
Captain Crawler's Cutlasses took out a few dozen more orcs. At least they seemed to be diminishing in numbers. Barbie was perhaps a bit too preoccupied to make more.
A few more of the tentacles licked out and took some orcs overboard. Beside me Zan grinned, and with his legs locked through the ratlines, threw both hands out in a victory gesture, "Yeah!"
I still couldn't find Bran.
Doc looked up from slashing through several huge tentacles and three or four orcs, he saw the sailing palawntir. He held out a hand, and retracted two claws. The open end of the palawntir clinked onto the claw.
A trail of fuschia smoke marked where Captain Crawler was hacking his way through more tentacles of doom. A deep groan came from the water, the Watcher listed and bubbled as if it had indigestion. Beside me Zan had turned nearly purple with concentration.
"An midui orath vin, a dennin inath vin!" I shouted. For our days are ending and our years failing.
The Watcher listed farther, gurgled. Tentacles writhed and retreated. The strain on Zan's face lessened.
Barbie glowered, wriggled a hand. The Watcher hiccupped and new tentacles wriggled out of the lagoon.
Liz took advantage of Barbie's preoccupation with the Watcher and pressed the attack.
Barbie reached up, grabbed a snakey loose line and swung both feet hard toward Liz.
Legolas reappeared, at the other end of his line now, driving both feet in the direction of Barbie's shoulder blades. She spun and held up a hand, and he sailed past. At the end of his swing, he wavered for a moment over the water.
I sang a spell.
Barbie gestured.
The line broke.
Tentacles reached.
I needed the palawntir.
Doc looked up at me, one clawed glove fending off a mighty tentacle."Fastball special!" his deep voice boomed from the deck below. "Here, catch!"
"I failed baseball 101!" I shrieked as the palawntir sailed past me and out of sight.
Bamf!
Bamf!
"I've never missed a catch." came a sexy, accented voice behind me. A red ball perched on a blue hand appeared in my field of vision. I turned and came nose to chin with Nighty. Nightcrawler the circus aerialist who'd never missed catching his trapeze companions. He reached up...down...he was hanging upside down..and handed me the palawntir. "If you'll excuse me, my lady." He bowed...very odd upside down..."I don't think Legolas is enjoying his swim." And he was gone in a flash of fur and brimstone.
Below me Liz traded blows with Barbie so fast I couldn't follow them. Doc and Tas and Jon hacked through orcs and more slimey tentacles of the deep. Leggy and Nighty had vanished overboard. And Zan was clinging to the ratlines above me, focusing painfully hard on regaining control of his squid from hell, and really really wishing he was home beating Juggernaut senseless on Playstation.
I couldn't find Bran or Ian anywhere.
I clung, wrapped around palawntir and ratlines. What spell would work? What spell would stop her?

lephae-a-canad: Legolas
One of the reaching tentacles wrapped around my leg like one of the great forest snakes, but one cold as the depths and oozing with evil-smelling slime. I caught a great breath and reached for my knives, and the turquoise water closed around me.
Clear it was, for I could see my foe from end to end; like a great rock that had lain at the bottom of the deep and risen to the surface, one big enough for our ship to dash herself to pieces upon. The surface water had lost the cold of winter with the Ravenkin's spell, but the depths never warm, not even in summer, and the Watcher brought with it biting cold from those depths.
Neither the one who created the Watcher, nor the one who had seized control of it wanted me drowned and sunk to the cold, dark bottom of the lake, but the magics had run loose like a panicked horse without a rider, and the creature held me in a grip like iron.

Lorien
"Gariel maegech Gil-galad
Thol palan-gennen, ann-vegil;
A giliath arnoediad
Tann thann din be genedril."
His sword was long, his lance was keen
his shining helm afar was seen
the countless stars of heaven's field
were mirrored in his silver shield.
"What?" Nazgul Barbie said. She froze in her tracks, as surely as if I had encased her in ice. The reason for the transformation had just shimmered into existence before her; tall, stately, clad in silver mail and studying her with steely grey eyes. He was fair of face beyond even the measure of Legolas. "Whatthehell?" Nazgull Barbie whispered. Behind her the Watcher gave a last groan and vanished into the deep. She didn't notice. Orcs fell under the weapons of the Fellowship and were not replaced. She didn't notice. She stood, transfixed, mouth open in disbelief.
Or some kind of fangirl stupor. He was gorgeous. More than gorgeous. Beautiful as only a king of the Noldor; son of Fingon-Cousin-to-Galadriel could be. Don't just stand there. I thought at him, take her head off or something.
He raised his long shining sword in a move like dream. The palawntir squatted warm and humming with power in my hands.
"Lorien! No!" I barely heard the voice. It might have been Bran's.
Below me Gil-galad the Elvenking moved like a lion before a stunned antelope fawn.
"Lorien!" Liz. And Jon... their voices echoing oddly off my skull.
It was so easy, so easy to just...not...stop him.
Easy.
Another voice... real? No, a memory. Gandalf. Or maybe Ian MacKellan saying the lines in the movie. Or Dad, reading them a long time ago and far, far away; 'Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life...can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'

lephae-ar-leben: Legolas
I slashed at the great beast with the knives Dana had given me. Fair they were, and swift enough even in the cold water of the lake. And sharp as falcons' talons. But the tentacles were as great as young trees, and as fast as I slashed one, two more would take its place.
I learned to swim in the Great Forest River. And to stay in its wintery depths long enough to coax fish into my hands, to learn the secrets of those quiet eddies and cold pools. But even the Elves of the Sea cannot breathe water, or hold their breath forever.
I felt a shock wave that was not a reaching tentacle, heard a muffled almost-sound, saw a flash of red light at the edge of my vision. Red, purple, brilliant among the sunlit greens, a color never seen in that place.
A very welcome color.
With the speed of dream, a cutlass slashed through a tentacle by my head, a two-fingered hand reached for me.
I shot downward, pulled by another great writhing arm at my feet. I coiled and hacked at it, but it was thicker than the rest, the knife only sliced halfway through.
A flash of red light again, a slow sweep of silver through the tentacle reaching for my neck. A hand reaching for me again.
It missed.

Lorien
"Daro!" I whispered to Gil-galad.
Above me Zan let out a relieved breath.
Below me Liz barreled into Nazgul Barbie and she went down. She rolled, and came up trying to take out Liz's head with a foot. Gil-galad blocked it with his shining shield full of stars. Barbie hesitated again, staring up at his beautiful face.
Liz leapt on her.
I held the palawntir tight to my chest, trying to think of what to do next. Maybe I could just send her to Outer Mongolia.
"One ball to rule them all." Zan said, he looked terribly young. And afraid.
Of me.
"Wonder if it works the same way." I said, watching my reflection in the deep red globe. Works the same way as the Ring. The Ring Sauron had put all his power into. The one that when destroyed, took Sauron's power with it. The palawntir hummed against my arms, straight through to my dan tien, my center. Power. Lots of it. Power to transform me, Liz. To put all the Brittany clones in their place. To get any guy we wanted. Anything we wanted.
Power.

lephae-ar-eneg: Legolas
The sunlit waters were far above us now as the tentacles thrust us down into the dark depths, dark as the forest at twilight, cold as the midwinter night. Kurtvagner followed me, in flashes of light the color of dawn, leaping, twisting with the agility of a lifetime on the trapeze; but slow as dream in the dark green water. He reached and missed again and again as the Watcher pulled me out of his reach.
One of my knives went spiraling into the depths, and one of Kurt's swords. A great cloud of silt boiled up like a thunderhead, engulfing us in darkness. Now I could only feel my foe's attacks, and hoped I would not knife Kurtvagner by mistake.
Even in the dark of the thunderhead of silt, I could see the red flash of his teleport. Something gripped my hair, and it was not one of the Watcher's tentacles.
But the grip was not strong.
And there was no red flash to follow it.
I reached, caught his hand with mine, and slashed free of the Watcher. The hand in mine loosened, I tightened my grip on it, kicked up, toward the light, above the murky cloud. The water cleared, and I could see Kurtvagner's face, dazed, desperate for breath.
Tentacles reached for us. I slashed with my knife and it stuck, retreating with the tentacle into the depths. Another snaked up toward us.
Now would be a good time to teleport. Now Kurt, now!
No flash of red broke the endless green of the water.
I kicked harder, tossing one of his cutlasses to lighten us, taking the other in my hand to slash at the reaching arm of the Watcher.
I felt the welcome warmth of the surface layer, saw the bright turquoise of sunlit water, and Kurt went limp in my arms.

Lorien
I raised the red glass ball and threw it hard. The deck below was solid and kind of hard to miss, even for somebody who had failed baseball 101.
I didn't miss.
It shattered into a thousand glittering fragments, a ring, a shell of light flashed out and vanished with a faint boom like distant thunder. Gil-galad stopped, wavered like heat waves over asphalt, he looked up at me with eyes full of stars, smiled and faded. Something in the quarry burbled and went still. A handful of orcs on deck stopped and stood still. Tas kicked them overboard, and they vanished into water and light. A shiver went through the timbers of the ship, the rigging I was perched on rippled like a horse's skin, trying to shed a fly. I hugged the itchy ropes with desperate strength. Beside me, Zan spat out what must have been a spell. He gestured and the ship steadied itself.
Nazgul Barbie screamed. Not the blood-curdling wail of a lost soul, or the fearsome cry of an enemy warrior. The scream of a small child whose best toy has been stolen or broken. Liz had her in a headlock, but it wasn't necessary.
The rest of the Elves and the lone Dwarf came running aft, coming to an uncertain stop a few feet away, Bran and Ian among them. Jon stepped forward, knelt in front of Barbie, "Let her go." he said to Liz. She did and Barbie crumpled into a sobbing heap on deck, like a two year old in the throes of a bad tantrum.
Jon looked up at me. He gave me a long, steady look. It made me think of Galadriel reading the hearts of the Fellowship. Then he smiled, wide and warm. "Come on down. It's over."
"I can't." I said in a small voice. I can't climb, you dorky Elf.
Tas gave him the sort of look you give an annoying little brother. A moment later she was perched in the ratlines beside me, catching one hand in hers. Phoomph. And we were on the deck.
"Crawler...Legolas..." Liz said, looking around.
Bamf.
Nightcrawler wavered, wobbled, sputtered, his tail a limp blue squiggle on the deck behind him. Legolas had an arm around him, as if he'd just hauled him out of someplace extremely unpleasant. Both were dripping with goo that smelled worse than the sulpherous bamf. All but one of Nightcrawler's cutlasses were missing. The remaining one was in Legolas' hand.
"I will never be able to watch that Watcher in the Water scene the same way again." Nightcrawler said. "Or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."
"Watcher?" Legolas said. "Is this from The Book?"
"Ja, and the movie, although I thought it was better in the movie. Until now. Ehhhh. You should be careful when you get to..."
"Nevermind." Jon said sternly. "You'll find out soon enough when we get you home."
A laugh began, low, then louder. We all looked down. Ex-Nazgul Barbie looked up. "Home? You can't get home. Not now. You needed the gazing globe."

The Ex-files
Lorien
"You lie." Liz said flatly.
Barbie raised a hand, gestured. And absolutely nothing happened.
"Wow, Lorien, it worked!" Zan said, wide-eyed.
"What worked?" Nightcrawler said. He looked like a wet cat, soggy, dripping with Watcher goo, eyes glowing out from between strands of gooey, limp hair. He was still trying to remember what it was like to breathe, and leaning heavily on Legolas.
Legolas looked like an annoyed, soggy owl. One that might want to see how long Barbie could hold her breath at the bottom of a cold dark lake.
I pointed at a few red shards yet littering the deck. I opened my mouth a few times and no words would get past my lips. I'd stopped her, broken her power as surely as Gandalf had broken Saruman's when he broke his staff. As surely as Frodo, or Gollum, had destroyed Sauron's when he melted the Ring. I'd destroyed her power and I'd also destroyed any chance of getting Legolas Thranduilion or Kurt Wagner back home.
"I'm sorry." I whispered to them.
Tas' hand tightened supportively on my shoulder.
"Like I said." Liz said, "You're full of..."
"Yeah," Tas said.
"There was no palawntir when I did the spell. I didn't even know it existed." Liz looked at me, "What do you remember?"
Funny, I could remember it all now. The whole scene in Barbie's basement; Feathers. Blue-green feathers marked with purple. A brazier burning with an evil smelling concoction of herbs. Tossing those feathers into the fire. And more; a chant, a spell, I guess...the words came back to me now that Barbie's charm had been broken...and there had been no palawntir in sight.
"There was no palawntir in the basement when I did the spell that brought Kurt here." I said.
"You did it?" Liz said.
"Under the influence." I pointed at Barbie.
"Why?" Zan said.
"I was under the influence of Unadulterated Evil!" I snapped.
"No no no, why would she have you do it?"
"Because she can't." Liz said suddenly.
Legolas eyed Barbie the way Galadriel had eyed Boromir. "Yes." he said softly.
"Do you have any idea how hard it was to find seventeen year old virgins in this county?" Barbie shrieked.
"What?" Kurt said.
Liz turned purple.
Zan tried unsuccessfully to stifle a snicker.
Doc gave him a long look and popped one claw. The middle one.
"Well so what. You'll never get the spell." Barbie hissed.
"Oh yeah?" Tas said, taking a step forward.
"Whoa." Ian said, holding out a hand to block her.
Jon held up a commanding hand. Everyone froze.
Barbie smirked.
"I remember the spell." I said.
"What?" everyone said.
"Every word."

Lorien
Her name was Monica Saurman. Yep, Saurman. Under Jon's eagle gaze she told us a tale that would have made a great plot for some soap opera; the ex from hell, a couple of boyfriends out of Freddy Meets Jason, an unsuccessful attempt (by use of magic) to keep a really nice guy: an Elf whose family Jon recognized, a family who had apparently come to his aid in escaping her machinations.
And finally, Legolas and Kurt.
"It still won't work in reverse, you know." she said of the spell needed to send them back.
Jon leaned forward, he looked like my English teacher when somebody hasn't finished their project, and hands him a lame excuse like, 'my brother's iguana ate it'. "Lorien remembers the physical components as well. And they seem to be the same ones used in Liz's spell."
Liz is an airhead when it comes to things like this, but she had remembered with a little help from Bran. He's almost as good as Professor Xavier. And a lot hotter.
"You can't send them back from the same location." Monica said. "And you can't use the same spell."
Jon leaned forward, looking like a leopard about to spring. "You're talking to a Gatesinger." He glanced at Bran, "Two of them."
"Where do you think I learned the spells in the first place?"
"Magic for Dummies?" Bran said.
Barbie...Monica..shot a glare at him that would have melted mithril plate. He grinned back a like a pirate.
Zan waggled his fingers, and something materialized in his hands. Long, bluey-greeny feathers marked with purple.
Monica's eyes went wide.
"Liz's spell was in Sindarin." Jon said. "Lorien's in German. But these opened the Gates." He gestured to the feathers, like Elrond focusing the attention of the Council on the Ring. "I guess your Gatesinger wasn't an Elf."
Monica's eyes did the impossible and widened further, till she looked like Gollum.
"Yep." Bran said. "Raiders of the Lost Orc." He started humming the theme from the first Indiana Jones movie.
"If she used Dragonkin-magic to bring us here, then they would know how to send us back." Legolas said.
Monica laughed. "The ones who told me would never share their secrets with you. If you could find them." Her eyes flicked to the shore. Jon's followed her gaze.
"One of the O.R.C.s," Nightcrawler said.
Bran fixed his eyes on Monica's, and the pirate swashbuckler was gone, replaced by something more akin to one of Odin's messengers. She shrank back, but couldn't free her eyes from his. Finally he nodded, never taking his eyes off her. "There is one among them who taught her well. Find him and you find the spell."
"She is right about one thing," Legolas said, "they will be difficult to find." He nodded toward the far shore where his bow of green light had flattened many O.R.C.s but an hour ago.
The shore was empty. The orc women had come, collected their delinquents and gone.

Raiders of the Lost Orc
Lorien
"Can't you guys just follow them or something?" Liz said.
"They have their..." Jon began.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but there must be some way to find out where they went, or get your buddy, whatz'ername to come back here."
"They do not come when called."
"Well, how do you find them when you want to?"
"You don't. They find you."
Zan stood, twirling his illusory feathers.
Tas eyed them and spoke suddenly, "Irony is, technically I could follow them. I can track things, teleport after them if I have some physical connection to the thing I'm following. Not that any of us have ever followed them into...well...wherever it is they go when they vanish."
Liz's eyes went as big as Elijah Wood's. "Whoa." She dug frantically inside her baggy pirate shirt, in a most unladylike fashion.
Legolas cocked a startled eyebrow, then looked skyward.
Nightcrawler found something very interesting on the deck at his feet.
"Would these do?" Liz said, and thrust a handful of orc feathers under Tas' nose.
Tas plucked them out of her hand, "Are these real?" She glanced at Zan.
"Yeah, they're real. I yanked 'em off a couple of the orcs I flattened." Liz's face looked more predatory than Shenzi's. Her grin widened. "One of them might even be the orc we're looking for."

Lorien
Tas could teleport in there, wherever there was, but not with all of us. Nightcrawler could teleport a number of us, but not until Tas had taken him in there so he could see where he was going. It was like arranging shuttle vehicles to kayak a swift forest river; cars at the beginning, cars at the end, and lots of people driving back and forth forty miles to kayak ten. We stood in a circle on the deck of Zan's brig arguing, I mean, discussing, who would need to go in the first place. Tas twirled the feathers, absently, saying less than anyone expected. Jon suggested...rather strongly...that two unarmed teleporters was more than enough chaos and disturbance for the orcs' homeworld. Zan thought an illusory army might be useful. Jon mentioned the fact that someone needed to deliver Monica to the Grandmothers. Bran suggested a teleporter would be more efficient than a helicopter, and that a shapeshifter and sound mimic might be useful in orc country.
And it looked, once more, as if Liz and I were being left out of the picture.
After two or three minutes Tas simply vanished, Nightcrawler with her. She returned a moment later, hair and clothes looking like she'd been through another battle, with a mud-encrusted Nightcrawler and a bedraggled, crestless, and unhappy looking O.R.C. She thrust him at Jon.
"You're the one who speaks orc. Pick his brains."
The orc hunched in front of Jon like a hawk in cold rain. There was a brief exchange of low hisses and gutteral growls. Jon looked up at Tas. "Wherever you got him, put him back, put him back now!"
"What!?" Tas peered back in astonishment through straggled strands of muddy mane.
"He knows nothing about the gate business." Jon said. "And you are endangering not only our relationships with the orcs, but their internal pack structure. Take Legolas and Nightcrawler, and no weapons. Petition Ashnarii for an answer to returning them."
They stood, eye to eye for a moment, a conversation going on that no-one but they could hear. Tas snorted, spun, caught Legolas' hand, nodded to Nightcrawler and vanished. Nighty glanced at us apologetically, and hestitated...
...just long enough for Liz and me to grab his tail just as he bamfed.
"OW!" Nightcrawler said as the sulphurous smoke cleared.
"Sorry about the tail." Liz and I said in unison.
"What...are...you...doing...here?!" he said, yellow eyes going from one to the other of us in a kind of panic.
"Standing on a very big rock." Liz quipped. She looked down. "Whoa."
Very big rock was something of an understatement. With a death grip on Nighty's tail I leaned forward to see. Big mistake. I closed my eyes and felt a hand catch my shoulder. "Who put Caradhras in the middle of Pennsylvania?" I said.
"I don't think we're in Pennsylvania anymore, Toto." Liz said. She looked out over what I had at first taken to be distant snowfields. I realized now they were the tops of clouds. The sun shone down on those clouds with a hard yellow brilliance you never saw at home; home with its cars and factories and windborne pollution. The air was cool, like the Rockies in July, with the same kind of remnant snowdrifts hanging off the sides of the nearer slopes. Above, the sky was the deep blue of Nightcrawler's skin, of Bran's eyes.
It was noticeably hard to breathe. "Where's Tas and Legolas, and the miserable orc?" I asked.
Nightcrawler pointed, a swift motion like a sword drawing, "What are you doing here!" he repeated, somewhat more vehemently.
"Hey, it's our quest." Liz said, and started in the direction he'd pointed, even though I couldn't make out anything that looked remotely like a trail, just a lot of tumbly rock and the low, sparse plants of alpine tundra. "Hey Elf, are you going to help us or not?" Liz called back over her shoulder.
"I should take you back." Nightcrawler said without much conviction.
I let go of Nighty's tail and started scrambling after Liz, trying not to look out over the great snowfields of cloud. Probably hiding a thousand foot drop. I heard him sigh, glanced back and saw him follow us on elvishly light feet.
We heard the noise first. Like the low rumble I'd heard before, like an earthquake about to happen, but mixed with a chaos of shrieks and clicks. Giant prehistoric killer birds in a feeding frenzy. We dropped down a twisting trail into the cloud soup, then the trail leveled out, and just when I started really wishing somebody'd brought Bran, the soup thinned enough for us to see.
A wide bowl, still too high for meadow or trees, rimmed with rocks that would have made good shelter, or good castle walls. The middle of the bowl was filled with orcs, all shouting at once, and in their center were Legolas and Tas. She had one hand on his arm, and I tried to remember if she had to see to teleport, because all that was around her was fog and rocks and orcs.
"Holy great piles of horse crap." Liz whispered.
Our crestless orc was nowhere to be seen.
I scrabbled to a halt on the loose rock and said...rather too loudly...the first thing that came to mind; "Hey dol, merry dol, ring a dong dillo, ring a dong hop a long, fal lal the willow."
"Was?" Nightcrawler turned from his place on the edge of the rock wall and gave me a look that clearly said; your mind is full of drunken zebras, and the lions are circling.
All the orcs in the bowl fell silent and gave me the same look. With more teeth.
"Well then," Liz said, climbing down into the bowl, "might as well join the party."
The three of us strode up to the orcs like Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn striding into Meduseld to meet Theoden, King. Nightcrawler put a hand on my shoulder and steered me gently to larboard; "There's Ashnarii." he whispered. I could see the tall orc chieftainess at one end of the chaos, the highest point of the bowl.
Liz reached out a hand and gave the nearest orc a light push in the chest. She stepped back, mouth open in either startlement, or anticipation of a tasty snack. We walked through them to where Tas and Legolas stood, near Ashnarii's end of the circle.
"Le abdollen." Tas said, straight faced. You're late. Just like Legolas in Two Towers.

lephae-ar-odog: Legolas
The quarry and the ship vanished, my innards turned outwards and my outards inwards. Then the world snapped back into focus again; the pooka, the orc and I stood in the midst of a wide, grey-green circle of tundra. The sun beat warm and golden, but the mountain was reaching near to Elbereth's stars, I could see them glittering through the thin air. The orc gave a startled gasp, broke free of Tas' grip and ran. He did not run far.
A handful of females came over the ring of rock and caught him. They carried him off into the fog that clung to those slopes. I did not hear where they went.
I ran forward, looking for their trail, motioning for Tas to follow.
"I don't think we need to look for them." she said, and stopped in the center of the tundra bowl.
Silently they came over the rock rim, like cats hunting. In a moment we stood in the center of a circle of teeth and claws and tensed muscle. A few were muddied as Tas... and limping.
Tas grinned at them. "Wanna try a second round?"
They showed their teeth but did not step forward. "What have you done?" I said to her.
"Kidnapped the wrong orc, apparently."
"I think your diplomacy skills would have old Linion pulling out his hair!"
"Who?"
"One who taught me many of the duties of being the son of a king."
"Great, you have any better ideas?" Tas glared at me from under her muddied forlock. She nodded at the circle of orcs, "I don't think they attended any of your classes." She turned in a slow circle so that none of them would be at her back for more than a heartbeat. I set my back to hers. She reached out a hand and held it near my arm. "Just in case," she said, "stay close."
They closed around us, hissing and rumbling like a river gone mad.
"I don't see their fearless leader, do you?" she said.
"No."
The orcs circled closer, rumbling among themselves, showing their teeth, raising their hackles and their great feathered crests. One of the nearest ones feinted a lunge and came up short a foot from my nose. One behind her snarled something and the lunging one backed into the circle of her fellows.
"It appears we may have some difficulty acquiring the return spell." I said.
They pushed in, nearly on top of us. Then a roar cut the thin mountain air, and they froze.
"There is Ashnarii." I told her. The tall leader came forward and her pack parted to let her through. Another deep rumble and they backed up, leaving open tundra the length of a short spear throw between us and them. Ashnarii stopped two strides from Tas, glaring down at the pooka with hard yellow eyes. Her mouth opened in a grin only one of the ancient dragons could have matched.
"You are dangerous, Elf." she leaned close to Tas.
Tas nodded, a shallow bow, never taking her eyes off the orc leader. The pooka smiled, "I'll take that as a compliment." She kept a hand near mine.
"I meant it as one. It is a sad thing that you are not one of my hunters." Ashnarii glanced at the muddied, limping orcs. They ducked their heads and tried to vanish into the pack. She gave me a long look, then her eyes turned back to Tas, "None of the Elves have been here in many lifetimes of Men. Why are you here now? Why did you disrupt the discipline of our youth, the quiet of our land? And why bring this one, who started trouble before?" she nodded at me, then her gaze turned back to Tas. "And why come back? Perhaps you wish to give my guards another lesson? You are already a legend among our wayward youth!" She gave me a long gaze, like a hawk eying prey. I met her strange eyes and saw something beyond the perilous hunter; a queen of a strange land to whom I was as strange...and dangerous...as she was to me.
I spoke, "I know nothing of your land, or your people. I have only been in the land of her people," I gestured to Tas, "for a few turns of the moon. At first I mistook your folk for the wicked folk of Mordor, who have wrought much evil in my own land. I know now I was wrong. I bowed, as one should before a queen, "You too are children of Eru, running under the same stars, breathing the same air. Your legs are swift, your talons sharp, your patterned coats beautiful as dancing leaf light on the forest floor. We have both fought to right the same wrong. I only wish to return to my land, and your folk, it seems, have the key."
Ashnarii turned and spoke to her pack, her tribe, in her own tongue. Around us, a low rumble started anew. It was a bit like one of my father's council sessions...only much louder.
"Things are about to get interesting." Tas said.
Then Liz came over the rimrock with Lorien and Kurtvagner in tow.

Lorien
"Ashnarii was kind of impressed with my kidnapping of your bald orcling, and my flattening of several of her best guards." Tas said to Liz and me. "But we haven't had much luck convincing her to give us the spell."
"What's going on here?" I looked at the tight circle of teeth and talons and began calculating the pounds per square inch of either one...if a four pound Great Horned Owl could produce 1000 psi...
"Kind of like an entmoot, only louder, and a whole lot faster." Tas said.
I wondered who would be faster, the orcs, or our teleporters. And whether either teleporter could bamf to someplace that wasn't a thousand foot drop.
Legolas hadn't said anything, and his face held no clue what he was thinking. He made a tight, back to back circle with Liz and me and Kurt. It made me think of him and Aragorn and Gimli surrounded by Rohirrim. I had a sudden awful image of him saying 'you would die before your stroke fell' and staring Orc War III.
"What happened to our bald orcling anyway?" I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
Tas didn't have time to answer because Ashnarii stepped closer, stared at Liz and me with eagle-yellow eyes and said, in her Oxford accented alligator voice; "Why are you here?"
I exchanged an incredibly stupid openmouthed stare with Liz. Then looked back at the Dragonkin chieftaness, who looked a whole lot like one of those giant killer birds from Walking With Prehistoric Beasts. Or maybe a feathered version of one of the Raptor Pack from Jurassic World. The ring of Dragonkin was silent, eerily silent, eerily still, like hawks on hunting perches. Like crouched tigers. Tas stood, stance casual, one hand dangling near Legolas' arm. Nightcrawler's tail flicked against my boot and stayed there. We could be out of that deadly circle in a heartbeat.
But that wasn't why we were there. I held out both hands, empty hands, and nodded to my friends, also significantly empty-handed. Then I folded my hands in that gesture I'd seen Jon do. I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked up into Legolas' eyes. His face shifted into the slightest of smiles. He folded his hands in the same gesture.
A soft intake of breath ran around the circle of orcs. A sound of surprise and approval. I spoke; "One of our people used and corrupted many of your young males, trading human technology for your secrets. With those secrets, she pulled these two out of their worlds," I gestured to Nightcrawler and the Prince of Mirkwood, "away from their homes, families..." I studied the circle of hard muscled bodies, their poses comfortably close to each other, like a school of fish, or a wolf pack, or a sled team..."their packs. They are needed there, in their own worlds, and we need the way to send them back." Not much of an inspiring speech, but it was the best I could come up with, surrounded by so many teeth.
"Mae carnen." Legolas said softly, well done.
Ashnarii stalked up to Legolas, he moved away from me a step, drawing Ashnarii with him...leaving Nightcrawler more room to bamf me and Liz out of there if we had to.
"You are dangerous." she said bluntly, then her mouth opened, showing way too many teeth. It might have been preparation for a light snack...or a laugh. "Our young machine riders have already made you a legend, like that one." She nodded toward Tas. The grin widened impossibly. "We have told the youngest ones, those who admired the off-roaders, that they will have to deal with all of you if they follow that path. And you." She turned to Nightcrawler, "You resemble the Firstborn, especially the Nightwalkers, the Dark Elves, but yet..." she narrowed her eyes as if trying to see beneath the blue velvet skin.
"I'm from yet another branch in the stream of time. My folk are human, but born different; mutants." Nightcrawler said. He gave Legolas a quick questioning glance. Probably, I thought, wondering what Legolas knew, from the comic, about his family tree. Legolas' face revealed nothing.
"Yet," Ashnarii continued, "you resemble us, somewhat. And you too are dangerous; as swift and agile as our own, and with a magic not unlike ours. If you were lost from my pack, I would miss you."
Kurt bowed, as if before a queen.
She turned her head toward me, "You have some skill with words. Words which have power. Words to make our council fall silent. Words which stopped young hunters in their tracks."
"Words which stole Kurt Wagner out of his world." I said.
"I see you did not mean for that to happen."
"I just want to get him back. Them back. Both of them." Please. I thought. But what could I do that would convince this alien queen to help?
"What would you do to return them to their worlds, to their packs?" She leaned forward, cocking her head, birdlike. I could see every scale of her face, every tiny feather of her head, every purple shading of the great crest feathers. Every tooth.
"Anything." I blorted out.
"That may not have been the brightest thing to say." Tas whispered.

PART THE FIFTH


The Passage of the Not-Nearly-Dead-Enough Marshes
(the Elvish Way With All Good Bugs)
Lorien
"Bring me a shrubbery." Nightcrawler muttered.
"What?" Legolas said, still staring at the sky. Overhead a distant skein of birds sailed with the wind, his eyes following it.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Nightcrawler said. "The Knights Who Say Ni. The heroes were required to bring them a shrubbery."
"Ah yes." Legolas said, eyes still on the sky.
I shot Liz a worried glance, even though I couldn't tell for sure if the distant birds were gulls. Sea-longing I mouthed silently.
She slowed and fell in beside me. "Gulls will be the least of our problems, I think."
We were plodging along a sort of trail in a soggy landscape, spikey with some kind of waist-high, user-unfriendly marsh grass. Yes, plodging. It was the word Liz invented the second hour of swatting ineffectually at the clouds of mosquitoes surrounding us, and occasionally sinking up to our knees in mystery goo.
None of the vaunted Elvish Way With All Good Beasts seemed to apply to the half a dozen kinds of bloodsucking mosquitoes, equal number of blood-sucking flies, and several kinds of ticks we'd discovered so far. Nightcrawler's sulpherous bamf cloud dispersed them for awhile, then they'd return in even greater numbers. His blackleather X-suit protected him...everywhere except his face, and tail, which lashed in wide arcs at the swamp air force.
"Ow!" Liz said.
"Ach, sorry about the tail." Nightcrawler said.
Tas looked even more annoyed, thick mane hanging in her face in an effort to ward off the flying hordes, at least her X-suit protected the rest of her. Liz and I were melting in our jeans and parkas, but at least the bugs could only attack us from the neck up. Liz had suggested Tas manifest us some X-suits and mosquito netting but Tas had given away as much of her own bulk as she could, at least until she had a few days to rest up and pig out. Legolas seemed to ignore the cloud of bloodsuckers around his head, though he had let his hair loose and falling over his eyes. Ahead of us stalked an Dragonkin tracker, seemingly undaunted by the overexuberant marsh life, and totally unaware of the wailing gulls overhead.
If you remember, when last we left our heroes, in their normal everyday world, it was December 23rd. And it had been a very long night and day, with no sleep and not enough time for breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, lunch, tea, dinner, supper, or midnight snack. A lot of things had happened since then, and nobody had slept. Not that that mattered to some people in the party; Legolas, as in The Book, still stepped as lightly as ever. So did Tas. And even Nightcrawler looked like he could run the whole 1200 mile Iditarod.
Bloody elves.
The Dragonkin had let us rest awhile, but they used no tools, and built no shelters, and didn't have things like soft, fuzzy blankets. They didn't even make campfires. Anyway, we had been on the top of a mountain, there were no trees, therefore no wood, to make a fire with. We had finally convinced them to send a few Dragonkin down the mountain, below the treeline, for some firewood, and Legolas and Tas had produced a fire out of the very thin air of the mountain. The Dragonkin had produced something raw and bloody, which Liz and Legolas had impaled on sticks and cooked over the fire. After seeing the shade of green I turned, remembering I was a vegetarian, and noting that we had nothing to carry water in (nor did the Dragonkin) Tas had teleported back to the brig in the quarry for supplies; warm clothes, lembas and miruvor. And then we'd piled up in a nice warm huddle on Dragonkin Mountain. Very nice when that included two of our favorite elves. The Grandmothers' lembas and miruvor was welcome, but I was beginning to feel like Sam in Emyn Muil; lembas bread...more lembas bread...yet more lembas bread. I was all ready for that huge Christmas pigout. Sans turkey, of course.
"Christmas, holycrap." Liz said. "It must be New Year's Eve by now."
"Ja, of next year." Kurt said.
"Change and growth is not in all things and places alike..." said Legolas, in uncanny resemblance to his lines, somewhere on the Anduin, in The Book.
"Time doesn't flow the same here as in our world." Tas said.
"Soooo, we're gonna come back in, what, 2210, just in time for Captain Kirk to break the rules of time travel again and bring us back home?" Liz said.
"And the Doctor to come along and fix things..."
"Or tangle it up some more."
"They're fictional." Tas said. She cast a glance at Legolas and Nightcrawler.
Kurt's tail snapped out and pinged an overly large bloodsucker off Legolas' left ear, not even touching the point. "Are you sure?"
"This place is kind of like a back eddy in a whitewater river." Tas clapped a hand on Liz's back, smashing a giant bloodsucking fly. "Bran probably hasn't even got Barbie back to the Grandmothers' yet. At least," she said, eyes fixed on something beyond the sight of Mortal Men, "that's how it usually works in pocket dimensions like this."
We had traveled down the mountain that morning, now the sun was glaring over a vast expanse of freshwater marsh, somewhere at the mountain's feet. Little birds sang from hidden places in the reeds. Herons and egrets stalked the shallows, spearing fish. A flotilla of something ducklike dabbled, butts skyward, after underwater plants. A wobbly skein of something that Legolas identified as cormorants drifted by overhead. The ubiquitous gulls wailed in the distance, just as they had on the Anduin, when Legolas heard them in the dark. In the Book. Despite the cloud of bloodsuckers buzzing in his ears, and the wheeling wailing gulls, he stared around him with wide-eyed wonder, pointing excitedly to grey amorphous blobs in the distance and describing every stripe, splot and feather. Crocodile Hunter Liz, who owned every field guide in existence, tried to identify them, between smashing more bloodsucking bugs.
Tried to identify...there were a lot that were unfamiliar to her, a lot I suspected were only to be found in Peterson's Field Guide to Alternate Timelines and Universes.
Something big roared in the marsh, entirely too close for comfort. And we were still weaponless. The Dragonkin had made it clear we must complete our mission without them.
Yeah, the mission. Bring me a shrubbery. I swatted at the mosquito cloud trying to fly up my nostrils.
Ahead of us the Dragonkin stopped. "I cannot go closer." she said, and pointed to a trail leading up through thickening grass, a low shrubby zone, and on to a distant treeline. In the space between the marsh and the trees, shrubs wove in and out of patches of open grass. I could see some sort of grazing creatures there. The Dragonkin spoke, "It is beasts like those Ashnarii wants. Once there were many here, now there are few. Through the Gate you will find more."
I gave her a hard look. Probably you ate them all, I thought.
Her mouth opened in what I hoped was an Dragonkin grin, "No, we did not." The Dragonkin had been unable, or unwilling, to describe the creatures we were being sent to round up. All we knew was that Dragonkin make much better hunters than cowboys. Their endangered species problem could only be solved by someone who wasn't an Dragonkin.
Legolas came up beside me and peered out over the land.
"Elo!" he breathed.
"Was? Was?" Kurt said, squinting.
"Horses?" Liz squinted too, "Why didn't you just say so?" she said to the Dragonkin.
The creatures moved, and they seemed a bit long-necked for horses. And they weren't grazing after all, they were browsing, reaching up into the taller shrubbery for leaves. "Antelope of some kind," I said uncertainly. It was hard to tell how far away they were, but it didn't look that far. They loomed among the shrubbery like grey boulders.
"No. Indricotheres." Legolas said quite clearly.
Everyone except the Dragonkin turned to stare at him in surprise.
"He watched a lot of Animal Planet." Liz explained to Nightcrawler.
"Aha." Nightcrawler said, wide-eyed.
I stared at the grey backs moving through the shrubbery, and readjusted my sense of perspective; those weren't shrubs, those were full grown trees. "Oligocene era." I added, "Seven meters tall, fifteen tons. About the size of eight rhinos, with a neck sort of like a giraffe. And it was Discovery Channel."
"Too big to be Dragonkin prey." Tas said.
"Very little here is prey." the Dragonkin scout said. "This...backeddy...is a refuge. The creatures here come to us from Elsewhen."
Nightcrawler was still giving Legolas a look of astonishment. "Aha."
"It might be better," said Legolas, his fingers twitching on a non-existent bow, "if we do not also encounter the hyaenodon."
"My knowledge of the Oligocene seems to be a bit spotty." Nightcrawler said.
"Picture a warg the size of a rhino." I told him.
"Oh...wunderbar."

The Dragonkin hummed, a deep note like something Treebeard would sing. The air before us shimmered, warped, and tuned itself in to someplace else. Behind us, the river and its marsh wound away toward the mountains, we stood high and dry on gently rolling slopes, and beyond, in that Otherplace the land stretched out; clumps of deciduous trees, scrubby shrubs, and low, grassy weedy looking stuff. At least it looked too dry to have more bloodsucking bugs. We stepped through, the Dragonkin didn't. "I will be here when you return. If you return." The Dragonkin scout grinned a toothy grin.
"We'll be back." Legolas intoned, he gave her a short, cool, unreadable look.
"Wait how do we..." I said.
The Gate shimmered closed behind us.
"Oh that's heartening." Nightcrawler said. His eyes went to Tas.
As if she had read his thought she said, "This is a Gate, I'm not a Gatesinger." She nodded at the patch of thin air the Dragonkin was now on the other side of, "She is." She started walking. At the moment, the direction didn't seem to matter.
"I thought you could just teleport back home." I said.
"From Dragonkin-world, yeah; it's like a backeddy in the time stream. But this place is a Gateworld; it could be the past, another branch on the tree of possibilities, or a whole other planet. The only way in and out is that Gate, or ones like it."
"Waitaminute, we're trusting an Dragonkin to let us back out of here? It'd be a real easy way to lose an inconvenient group of annoying people, leave us stuck in the Oligocene."
"They have been, in our experience, folk of their word." Tas said.
"I believe you are right." Nightcrawler said. He glanced at Legolas.
Legolas cocked a non-commital eyebrow and stalked toward the horizon.
"I hope so." I said, mostly to myself.
Legolas swung up into a lone tree, climbed to the top with the ease of a lemur, and scanned the horizon. He came down like Nightcrawler on a trapeze.
"Well?" Tas said.
He shook his head, turned and started jogging toward the nearest clump of trees.
Liz stared after him for about three seconds, then laughed, "We'll be back." she said, in perfect imitation of his earlier line. "Come on!" she began jogging after him. "Or we'll lose the Elfinator."
Tas blurred, shifted and knelt on one equine knee.
"You know, I ride bareback about as well as I climb." I said. "And swim."
She snorted and flicked an ear. I climbed on, clinging to her mane. She started off in a smooth long-legged walk, it quickened, shifted slightly, and sped up. In a moment we were beside Legolas and Liz. Liz looked over at us and did a double-take, "I didn't know she could single-foot."
"What?"
"Running walk, like a Tennessee Walker. No, more like a Paso Fino, she's small, her gait is quicker."
"Well at least I'm not falling on my ass."
Below me Tas' steady four-beat gait hiccupped as she threw in a fifth beat. I sloshed hard aport and grabbed mane. She snorted, it sounded like a laugh.
Somewhere behind me I heard the distinct bamf of imploding air, a moment later there was a flash of faint red in the distance.
A few minutes later Nightcrawler returned, looking like the Crocodile Hunter after too many poisonous snakes and giant spiders. "I think I found your hyaenadons."
The land ran flat as a shield of Rohan, as far as we...or even Legolas...could see. You would think something as big as an indricothere would be easy to find; by mid-day we had seen their relatives, the sloth-like chalicotheres, stretching three meters tall to browse on trees, intelodonts (two meter tall pigs with a brain the size of an orange), a few bear dogs, tiny primitive horses, uncountable birds and more hyaenodons. Nary an indricothere in sight. And we needed several of them, a whole herd, in fact, if the Dragonkin wanted a viable breeding population.
Most of the wildlife had ignored us, so far, except for the bear dogs who had followed us briefly, out of curiosity, and the small creatures that would one day be horses, with whom Legolas had a lengthy conversation. The Sindarin Elf walked, with long light strides, or jogged, an easy trot like a greyhound's gait, Liz pasted to his side, not breathing any harder than him.
Bloody Elves.
Legolas stared around himself in wonder, pointing out new creatures the Discovery Channel animators had not brought to life, and describing them to Liz or me, if they were too far for us to see clearly.
Kurt's eyes too were taking in the wonders, and potential dangers, of this strange world, though he had been in many stranger.
I noticed that when something roared in the bush, both of them moved like lightning to defensive positions around us, and Legolas' hands went to a non-existent bow.

lephae-a-tolodh: Legolas
I came down from the tree, "I see many creatures, but none of the ones we are looking for. But the land is broken, and scrubby, I need a good hill."
"I can arrange that." Kurtvagner said.
"There are no hills within many hours travel. The land stretches like a battered shield unto the horizon."
Kurtvagner grinned, a lightning bolt of white in a thunderdark face. He held out a hand, "Ever been skydiving?"
"They don't have X-jets in Middle-earth." Lorien began.
"Giant eagles..." Liz said.
I did not hear the rest of it, for Liz's words were swallowed by a flash of sunset color, a great stench, and a loud bamf.
I blinked and wind roared in my ears, wind sweeping up against my belly, I looked into the broad grin of Kurtvagner, gripping my arms. We sprawled on the wind like the wings of an eagle. I looked down and my words were lost on the wind. It took my breath and sang in my ears. The whole world lay spread out below like the patterened rugs of my father's halls. Kurtvagner shouted something but his words blew away on the wind. He shifted his body slightly, like the twitch of a hawk's feather.
Bamf.
And we were flying up.
"Look for them, look for them now!" he shouted.
I looked down, the great strange land of the distant past stretched below us and curved away over the edge of the round world. I could see the tiny figures of Liz and Lorien and Tas, her horse shape broken and hard to see because of her hide's patches of red and white. I could see the long-clawed chalicotheres browsing a hundred yards away, and a league beyond that. A hunt; the great beasts like wargs, chasing down a grazer I did not know the name of. A river, and the long-legged boars, taller than the horses of Rohan, coming to drink. A long limlug, thrashing out of the river to catch a boar in its mighty jaws, crocodile, Liz called them. And to the east, some ten leagues away, the grey boulder shapes of our quarry; the indricotheres.
"There!" I shouted to Kurtvagner, and nodded my head in their direction.
He nodded, and I saw that the wind had nearly stilled. The wind stopped, silenced. We hung on the still air like a dream, faint sounds drifting up from the distant land. Something roared, directly below.
"Now would be a good time to go." he said.
Bamf.
And we appeared in the air a few feet from the ground. He let go my arms, flipped and landed like my brother coming down from a tree. I landed beside him, and could not stop smiling.
"Did you see them?" Liz asked.
"That way, little more than ten leagues." I pointed.
"Wow," Lorien said, "You didn't even need a barf bag."

Lorien
Something crashed in the bush, entirely too close for an exploration team which had no large automatic weaponry. Legolas spun, reaching for his non-existant bow.
"Why didn't they let you bring our weapons?" Liz said to Tas.
"This is a test, this is only a test, for the next sixty hours this station will run large toothy hungry animals past you and you will have only your superior brain power to deal with it." I said.
"I think," said Liz, "that here, brawn is better than brains."
"Would that I had at least a knife. Then I could make a bow."
We all turned to look at Legolas as if he had just said something exceedingly profound.
"Well, duh," I said to Liz's astonished look, "you think Weta Workshop gave him all the bows he ever used?"
"You can make a bow?" Liz asked.
"Duh." I repeated. "How old is he? You think he just sat around Mirkwood singing tra-la-la-lally come down to the valley?"
"That was Rivendell." Liz said.
"What?"
"Rivendell, in the Hobbit, that's where they sang that stupid song."
"I knew that."
Legolas ignored both of us and stood, listening into the bush. "We should go." he said quietly. And frowned up at the nearest tree, its branches crooked and twisty, and definitely not conducive to bowmaking.
Tas swished her tail, turned and started off. Something coughed in the shrubbery behind us. Tas shifted into her quick paso gait, Legolas reached down, scooped something off the ground, and jogged lightly behind us, peering back. Nightcrawler ran just ahead...on his toes, I noticed, eyes scanning the bush, tail twitching like a cat under a bird feeder.
Tas' ear flicked, as if she had heard something, she stretched her legs and paced faster. I lurched, and something pinched me in the thigh. "Ow. Whoa." I said without thinking. Tas slid to a halt, haunches under her, turned her head, peering at me with one pale blue horse eye. She flicked an annoyed and questioning ear.
"Whatever's following us probably would go for the big juicy horse steak first." Kurt observed.
I wriggled a hand into my jeans pocket and withdrew the thing that had bit me. I held it out as if I'd just discovered that I'd been carrying the One Ring the whole time.
"Hey Legolas," I said, "What was that you were saying about a knife?"

The sun was going down like sixties tie-dye, we huddled around a campfire, one much bigger than any I remembered. Eyes glowed out of the dark bush, eyes too far apart and too high off the ground to give me that happy Disney Safari feeling. Liz sat, back to the fire, whittling, with my pocket knife, at a great, straight stick as tall as herself; a new bo. Legolas sat near her, braiding a string for the finished longbow laid carefully by his side. The donor of the horsehair for the string sat, in her normal form, on the other side of the fire, binding feathers onto arrow shafts with more horsehair. The shafts' sharp ends had been hardened in the fire; Legolas knew how to chip stone arrowheads, but didn't have the extra time. The feathers had been coaxed from a few dozen birds that afternoon; even in this strange Oligocene world the Elvish Way With All Good Beasts seemed to work.
Still, we weren't going to trust totally to that when it came to Hyaenodon and Friends.
I downed a few Keebler Elves; the Grandmothers' lembas, and curled up as close to the fire as I could without roasting. Legolas claimed first watch and Tas and Nightcrawler curled up in their own parts of the fire circle. Half asleep, I felt something twitch against my head, and realized it was Nightcrawler's tail, comfortingly close.
I drifted into dream; a lot of it seemed to involve an Elf or two, wearing somewhat less than the ones around our fire. He held out a hand, "Lorien, my love..."
Something screeched overhead, the Elf spun, reaching for his bow, there was the thling! of a loosed bowstring, and a startled shout from Liz.
I jumped up, foggy-brained, knocked part of the fire over, stomped out my smouldering boot and found Liz hanging onto Legolas' arm.
"Holycrap!" she was saying, "That could be one of our ancestors!"
"What?" I said, peering muggily at the tree. A chorus of screeches was fading into the distance.
Legolas was managing to look surprised and annoyed all at once.
"Something moved in the tree, he shot at it. It was some kind of monkeys, or lemurs or something. They're gone now."
The tree was a huge dark shadow above us. It still looked like anything could be about to drop on our heads and devour us.
"Ancestors?" Legolas said. "Does this word have another meaning I am unaware of?"
"Monkeys, primates. We're primates." Liz said, "And this world seems to be our past, so one of those little guys could maybe be the ancestor of somebody like, oh, Albert Einstein, or Ghandhi or Orli or Tolkien or us or something. If we kill one, a couple million years from now, it'll be somebody else starring as you in some other movie."
Legolas looked up at the tree, looked at Liz, and me, "Mankind is descended from little furry things with tails?" He eyed Kurt. "Oh."
"People in general are descended from little furry things with tails." Liz said.
"I thought he saw this on Discovery..." Kurt began.
"He missed the Australopithecus episode." Liz said.
"The Eldar were awakened by the waters of Cuivienen, under the stars, before the Sun was born!" Legolas said, "It was Araw the Hunter who first found us! The past of the Edain is hidden from us, not even the very wise know for sure. But..." he looked at Kurt again. And frowned, "The Sun is shining here so..."
"Looks kinda' dark to me." Liz quipped.
"Was shining. Shines. Sila. So the Eldar must walk some part of this world. And your folk too."
"Nope. We're still little furry things. If this is our past, not just some weird side branch in the Time Stream, and it sure looks like it. And the closest things to humanoid here are those little furry things in the trees you just shot at!"
"That cannot be!"
"Yeah it is. You said the past of the Edain is hidden from you. Well, a bunch of anthropologists like the Leakeys dug up a bunch of fossils, like Lucy, and mostly figured out where we came from; those little furry guys." Liz said. "You probably did too, and Dwarves and Hobbits and everybody else. All those stories are just poetic stuff people make up until they have science, and fossils and the Leakey family."
Legolas crossed his arms, "Poetry yes, but it is True; inspiration of the Valar."
"Inspiration, yeah, but Truth and Fact can be very different things." Tas said.
"Perhaps," Kurt said carefully to Legolas, "the Creator had a different method in your world. Or perhaps he did awaken your folk at Cuivienen, but it involved many years and lots of little furry things."
"She." I said.
Kurt cocked an eyebrow at me.
"OK," I said, "they."
Legolas looked up at the dark, starless sky, lit only hours ago by bright sun, "It would be good to find some of my folk in this strange place."
"Furry guys." Liz repeated. "Maybe you just shot at Finrod's great-great-great-great-great grandfather."
Legolas looked kind of appalled. Whether it was the thought of nearly doing in a legend's ancestor, or the whole idea of Elves evolving from things with tails, I wasn't sure. "Uhboy." Liz said, "Screwit, I'm goin' to bed. Just don't shoot any more monkeys. I don't want to get back home and find out you killed the zillion times great grandfather of Johnny Depp." She curled up and was snoring within a minute.
Tas shrugged and went to her own side of the fire.
"Maybe, as Liz said, this is not even your past, but another strange branch in the time stream." Legolas said to me.
"Maybe it's a whole other tree." I yawned.
"Perhaps," Kurt agreed, He turned to Legolas, "Tell me the Cuivienen story, the way you heard it in Mirkwood. I have read some of those tales in our books, but it would be best to hear it from one who lived in that land."
I settled between them; being in the middle of a conversation between my two favorite Elves was better than trying to resurrect my vanished dream. The night noises returned, Elbereth's stars stayed veiled behind a cloud layer; one that reflected no distant city lights. Legolas told his tale, as he had heard it from his father's fathers. Then he told another. Something tiny scuttled in the underbrush, something else shrieked in the distance and was cut short. Legolas glanced at it, but did not move his hand to his bow, lying beside him, and his voice did not falter. I fell asleep to the sound of him and Kurt discussing comparative religion, dinosaurs, dragons and time theories, with Nightcrawler's tail looped comfortingly close against my hair.

The Ride of the Indricothirrim
Paraceratherium transouralicum, INDRICOTHERIUM pervum; closest modern relatives; rhinos, tapirs and horses. The largest land mammals ever. Males were 4.5m at the shoulder, (over 7m counting the giraffish neck) and weighed 15 tonnes.
They would not fit in your barn.

Lorien
"Holycrap." Liz said, "I'd hate to clean that stall."
We stood staring up...and up and up...at a lone male, browsing on something that looked like Treebeard's grandfather. Despite the rough rhino-like skin, and the blocky head like a tapir, or a rhino, there was something graceful, horselike about him; with his long neck and long birch tree legs. He flicked a leaf-shaped ear...probably the size of a satellite dish...and nipped off some greenery with the delicate care of Pumpkin taking a carrot from my hand. He had given a cursory sniff in our direction, found us to be beneath his notice and gone back to browsing. Legolas leaned against the bole of the same tree, trying to understand the indricothere's thought, and having bits of leaf and twig flurry down on him. Liz sat beside him, back against the same tree, lost in a kind of elvish zen. Tas stood, in Elf-form, between us and the rest of the wildnerness, earth and sky eyes moving from Legolas to the shrieks and rustlings in the bush.
Nightcrawler watched Legolas, fascinated. "There was a woman in our circus who could whisper horses. The wildest, most ruined creatures would come to her."
"Maybe she was one of them." I nodded at Legolas.
"Or maybe," Nightcrawler said, "she was like Liz."
Yeah really, Liz who's got an Elf teaching her to talk to extinct mammals, while I felt rather like Pippin at Isengard; small rag-tag dangling behind the Mighty. Tired rag-tag who would be glad to stop dangling and lie down.
"Have another elf." Tas handed me one of the Grandmothers' Keebler cookies. I'd lost track of how many I'd eaten, but the sun had been low in the east when we found the lone male, and it was high and warm now.
I sprawled out again on my parka, "This could take awhile. Maybe we could just leave him here, pick him up in 20 million years or so."
"Ach, ja! Immortals." Kurt exclaimed. "If we went back to our own time right now, he'd still be there!"
Tas yawned, "Maybe not, maybe he'd have to wait for Captain Piccard to pick him up in the Enterprise."
"What?" I said.
"You still don't know where we are, do you?" Kurt said.
"Yup." Tas said, "Could be the other side of the universe for all I know. There were no stars last night to mark our position by."
"Well, it looks like all the pictures I've ever seen of the Oligocene." I said. "And some of those creatures were straight out of museum exhibits; except they were the wrong colors."
"No, I think your museum exhibits were the wrong colors." Tas said.
"Fossils don't leave a color record." Kurt grinned, a flash of star-white in night-sky blue. "You don't have a camera hiding in your other pocket do you, Lorien?"
I rummaged in my pooka parka. It had more pockets than anything I'd ever seen, and I'd stuffed a lot of stuff in there before throwing the icky pink coat on that fire back in the First Age. My hand closed on something small and rectangular. I pulled it out and stared at it.
"Hey Nighty." I tossed it to him.
He stared at it in disbelief. "A digital camera!"
"I always have it in my coat pocket when I go to the barn. To get pics of the horses and stuff."
He poked at it for a minute. "You've got a lot of storage space left here."
"That would shake up the scientific world." I said.
Nightcrawler shook his head. "They'd just think it was Photoshop." But he flipped it on and stalked toward the indricothere.
I lay back, eyes closed, warm sun beating on my face. In the daylight, it was a beautiful world. Green. Peaceful. Elvish. There had been ample, unpolluted streams in our path, an amazing variety of wildlife to observe. And now to photograph. I thought of the kick-butt school project I could do when I got back. The sky was clear of jet trails, the horizon clear of buildings or towers. There was no sound of distant engines, only the chatter of unseen birds, the distant musical call of something bigger.
And the sudden roar of something very large about three feet away. I scrambled to my feet, dragging my pooka parka with me; a scrambled set of images, like fast editing cuts in a movie battle scene, assaulted my senses;
...a large set of teeth, backed by a furry body the size of a truck barreling at me...
...the thunder of a herd's worth of feet on the ground...
...Tas planting Liz's bo like a pike on the ground, the other end pointing at the chest of another oncoming set of teeth...
...three arrows appearing like magic in the throat of the first warg...
...the whole thing falling, rolling in a cloud of ripped vegetation and dust to come up against the bole of a tree...
...the tree hadn't been there before, and there were three others like it...
...and they were moving...
...a tree-trunk coming down on a warg...
...the smell of brimstone, and a sudden gout of blood...
...another warg falling a few yards away, without a head...
...a warg doing a fine acrobatic flip, and Tas' warrior yell...
...the fwish fwish fwish of arrows passing entirely too near my ears...
Silence. Dust settling. The satisfied snort of a horse, only much louder, and from far too high above my head. Nightcrawler crouching, teeth bared, his X-suit and blue velvet skin splashed with red gore. Legolas pulling an arrow out of a fallen mound of fur chest high. Tas in wolf shape, trotting a circle, nose to the wind, returning, melting back into her elf-shape.
"All's clear." she said.
I blinked. Five great bodies, striped and splotched like sun and shadow lay scattered about the indricothere's tree. The indrik lowered a head the size of a refrigerator and nosed Legolas in the back. Just like Beowabbit. I stared up at four legs the size and shape and color of tree trunks. "Wow."
"Pretty cool, huh?" came Liz's voice from somewhere far above my head.
I looked up.
She was grinning at me from the indrik's withers, fifteen feet up.
Legolas knelt beside one of the huge striped mounds of fur. On his fair elvish face there was great sadness. "Hyaenodon." His softly accented voice made the word sound Elvish. "They were not evil, only hungry. The indricothere was too large for easy prey, but we were not. And they did not know what sort of creatures we were." He looked up at Liz, "I hope I have not killed someone's ancestor."
"Hyaenodons became extinct. They're nobody's ancestors." I told him.
He ran a finger along a broken, sunlit stripe, "Ai...such fantastic creatures, given time, I might have understood them."
"Well, at least we seem to have got our first indrik." I said.
Nightcrawler turned to me, startled. "Indrik? That is the name of a fantastich beast from Russian myth. Piotr told me about it once." His face softened, almost sad.
Peter, Colossus. A close friend long-gone. "What did it look like?" I asked. "The indrik."
"I believe it was something like a unicorn." His eyes traveled up the indrik's tree-trunk leg to Liz, perched like a sparrow on its withers. "Though not so tall." He blinked as if remembering something, reached into his X-suit and withdrew my camera. He looked at it and smiled. "Still in one piece."
"You have a camera?" came Liz's amazed voice from above my head.
Nightcrawler handed it to me. I raised it and shot up at Liz on her immense mount. "Dana'll love this one."
"Here." Nightcrawler said, reaching for it. I handed it back.
Bamf.
The indrik snorted and leaped sideways with a speed nothing that big should have been able to achieve.
Bamf. Nightcrawler hung in midair just long enough to get a great shot of Liz rearing magnificently like Gandalf on Shadowfax.
Only on a much bigger scale.

Ten minutes later Legolas had calmed the indrik down, Nightcrawler had apologized abjectly for the hundredth time, and Liz had broken several of Seabiscuit's racetrack records.
"This is going to be a problem." Liz called down from her perch on the indrik's withers. "We can't have Nightcrawler bamfless, and we can't have our indriks randomly running rampant across the Oligocene."
"Well, what would you do with Loda?" I yelled up at her.
"This critter's a lot smarter than Loda." she yelled back.
"Anything," said Legolas, "is smarter than Loda."
"We should start with a little bitty bamf...waaaaaay over there, maybe. Then let him get closer and closer until the indrik is OK with it. Have Legolas talk to him the whole time. He listens to me, sort of, but the Elf is better." She wrinkled her face in thought. "We could use the bamf, you know, to drive the herd or to scare away predators."
"I don't think it scared those hyaenodons much." I said.
"You missed the other half dozen that ran away after Kurt teleported the head off the first one..."
He was brushing ineffectively at the gloop covering his X-suit. It looked a whole lot like drying blood. He looked up, caught my dismayed expression and gave me an apologetic look. "Ja, I think we should find a nice stream somewhere." He called up to Liz. "You see anything from up there?"
"The other half dozen..." I looked nervously toward the clumps of trees in our path. "Wunderbar."

Kurt found his stream, small enough to not contain the crocodiles Legolas had seen devouring the pigs the size of Rohan warhorses. One of the many advantages of the X-suit, pooka-made or otherwise, was that it was a lot easier to clean than Nightcrawler's fur. Legolas knelt by the stream, upstream of Nightcrawler's bath, staring into water clearer than the Caribbean, and coaxing fish into his hands. Tas paced the perimeter of our temporary camp, nose to the wind. Liz practiced getting the indrik to lower his head to the ground with her on it, the only way she could mount the enormous thing.
"Hey Tas, can you learn to shapeshift into anything this big?" Liz called down.
She gave Liz one eloquently cocked eyebrow. "What for?"
Liz shrugged, "I had a vision of you running Godzilla-like through the next big school dance, terrorizing the Barbies."
Tas snorted. "I can terrorize them in this shape. With a slight change of costume." she blurred, reformed, and the X-suit was replaced by an evening dress like falling water.
"Whoa!" Liz said.
I just stood there, my mouth open like a big fish.
Kurt looked up, made a small strangled noise, and said, very quietly, "Legolaaaaaass..."
Legolas kept his eyes on his fish, "Shhh, not now."
Tas grinned at Kurt's astonished look. "I can have their boyfriends groveling, and them whimpering in defeat."
"Yeah, really!" Liz said.
"Can you give us lessons?" I asked.
Tas shifted back into her X-suit, but not without a great conspiratory grin.
"If we run out of your Keebler Elves, we know how we can get second breakfast." Kurt said to Legolas.
Legolas answered without taking his eyes from the fish he'd just cradled, then let go, "That would not be...fael."
"Fael?" Kurt said. His native accent added subtle shading to the Sindarin word.
"Ai..." Legolas called, "Lorien, what is the word in your tongue?"
I came over to the stream's edge, watched the fish in the current, waving like a flag. "Fair. Fair minded. Just."
"I see." Kurt said. "Yes, of course. But how can you hunt creatures you can talk to? I remember great hunts in Mirkwood, from reading The Hobbit."
Yeah, Elves ought to be vegetarians. I wondered why they weren't.
"It is the way of things. Like your hyaenodons. Not all creatures can eat grass." Legolas stepped up the bank and coiled his lean form onto the grass; he made me think of a cheetah, waiting for an antelope to wander by. He stayed silent for a minute. For two. Then, "In my father's halls there are great..." he frowned and looked at me, making shapes in the air with his hands. "Pictures..."
"Weavings?"
"Yes."
"Tapestries." I said.
"Stories are woven into them. Pennas."
"Histories."
"If every thread were the same color, they would not speak, breathe, live. This world, yours, theirs," he gestured at Liz and me, "all are like those tapestries, woven of many colored threads."
"Diversity." Kurt said, "That is something I understand well."

The bamfproofing of the indrik went well. Within twenty minutes the indrik allowed Kurt to bamf right onto his back, and soon, the lot of us were heading into the east, swaying gently fifteen feet above the ground. I was not surprised to find that something that big didn't trot or gallop, but, rather like an elephant, ambled in a smooth running walk; a super-giant-economy sized version of Tas' paso gait.
"Our indrik needs a name." Liz said.
"What's the Sindarin word for mountain?" Kurt asked.
"Aegas." I said. "That's mountain peak. Tunn is hill."
"Roch is horse. He's kind of a horse. Well, in the same family. Sort of." Liz said.
"Draug-dagnir. Wargbane." I suggested.
"They are not wargs." Legolas said.
"Tolog is trusty." I said.
"And torog is troll." Legolas added.
"Beleg, beleg means great, mighty." Liz said, "I wonder if Beleg Cuthalion would be amused by having an extinct mammal named after him?"
"Probably not," I said.
"He is the color of treeshadow." Legolas said. "Dair."
"Daer also means great, " I said. The two words sounded much the same.
"Daeroch." Nightcrawler said, making the ch exceedingly German, as if he were hacking up a hairball.
"Gesundheit." Tas said. Then snorted, guffawed, and nearly fell off the indrik's back.
It took me a minute to realize it was because Nightcrawler's tail had found its way to a very ticklish spot on her anatomy.

Western art, and old movies, are full of picturesque cowboys on picturesque cowponies moseying across picturesque miles of picturesque prairie, or sagebrush desert or windcarved natural monument laden landscapes.
What you don't see, in those old paintings and movies is the choking dust, the stiff muscles, the saddle sores. The fact that there is no air conditioning, no reclining seat, and no VCR in the ceiling. And no drive-thru big enough for an indricothere. We had moseyed, on our oversized cowpony, for hours; we had seen more picturesque landscape and picturesque creatures than any museum or paleontologist could imagine. It would make one helluva school report.
"Liebes, wake up, you are sliding off."
"Are we there yet?" I mumbled at the Indricothirrim in general. Gentle hands hauled me back to something like vertical. I blinked in the lowering sunlight. Ahead of me, a Rider rose, and ran up Daer's neck, with the grace of a cat going up a tree. He stopped and stood, balanced on the poll, the high part behind the indrik's ears, as if he were standing on the bowsprit of a ship.
"Not so very far, Lorien." Legolas said. "We should make camp near the herd. You can rest, I will make their acquaintance."
"We will make their acquaintance." Liz corrected, standing on Daer's withers as if on a snowboard.
"What will they think of Daer?" I asked. He was a young male. If the indrik herd was like a horse herd, it would be centered around an old mare, the real leader, but would have a strong stallion in attendance. One who would drive out all other males. If they were more like an elephant herd, they would be matriarchal; an older female and her kin. Any males would just be wandering through, there would be no herd bull.
"I don't know." Legolas said.
The sun was low on the horizon when I felt something change in the running walk of the indrik. Ahead of me, over Tas' shoulder, I could see Daer's head raise, the big ears prick. I heard a snort. Daer's pace quickened.
Legolas, perched on the indrik's neck, spoke to him. He slowed, then stopped, twitching his ears like Pumpkin when I asked her to trot over cavallettis and she really wanted to eat grass. He let out a disgusted snort, and lowered his head. Liz slid down it, with Legolas. Tas simply vanished from in front of me with a faint phoomph. Then the world turned into the first hill of a rollercoaster as Nightcrawler put his arms around me and bamfed.
The world came back into focus, and Daer was sliding off into the dark in that leggy running walk of his, head held high and ears eager.
"Looks like a kid at his first strip show." Tas said.
Nightcrawler shot her a startled look.
"Ah, I'd better follow him." Legolas trotted off into the gathering dark, bow slung over his back.
"I really hope there isn't a herd stallion." Liz said. "Things could get messy."
"He's young, inexperienced." Tas said. "Things are gonna get messy either way. Those girls will put him in his place."
"You're saying Hormone Boy is going to have his butt kicked by the mares?" Liz said.
"Just like the Zit Prince at a school dance."
"Ohboy." Liz said, and trotted off into the dark after Legolas.
Tas began to circle, picking up stray bits of wood. We followed, not knowing what else to do, and soon had a cheery fire...a large cheery fire...one capable of scaring off even the odd hyaenodon...blazing merrily. We broke out something like supper; there seemed to be no end to the Keebler Elves, though Tas had a bit of something beef jerkyish, Dragonkin leftovers, no doubt. From not nearly far enough away came sudden bellows, snorts, grunts, the odd scream.
"Lorien, your boot..." Tas proffered.
I looked down, the one I hadn't singed before was smouldering. Ok, so I was a little too close to the fire. I backed up and stomped it out. "Do you think they need help?"
Tas shook her head.
"Think there will be any indriks left to drive back to Dragonkinworld in the morning?"
Tas shrugged. A particularly loud bellow assailed our ears. Nightcrawler stood, and moved in the direction of the noise. Tas caught his tail and pulled him back to the fire. "What we don't need is the whole herd stampeding from a misplaced bamf."
He disentangled his tail from her grip. He looked worried. Like Legolas when he lost track of Gimli at Helm's Deep.
"He's OK. I can feel it." Tas said softly. "He's got it all under control."
Something roared, something crashed. Kurt jumped. There were more bellows.
"I don't think I want to see it when it gets out of control." I said.

lephae-a-neder: Legolas
I followed Daeroch into the twilight. Liz caught up to me quickly.
"You should rest." I said to her.
"I've got the rest of my life to sleep. How many times will I get a chance to learn about the behavior of an extinct mammal? From the Prince of Mirkwood, no less."
It was good that the shadows were long, so she could not read my face. I could feel her admiration; the weight of it might have been borne by one like Finrod, or Gil-Galad, one of the great Noldorin kings of old, but not by the youngest son of Thranduil of Mirkwood.
"You have already learned much." I told her. "Few of the Edain that I have met have such understanding of creatures other than themselves."
"You think?" she said hopefully.
"I know."
Her face glowed with a great smile. The words tumbled out like a clear stream over polished stones. "I want to train horses. The kind nobody else wants to. The kind everybody else gives up on. No, wait, maybe I really want to train people. Train them like you taught me, to really hear what their horses are saying."
"That will be hard. Maybe impossible. Most of the Edain do not listen."
"Maybe I can change that. Anyway, some of the Edain in your world learned; the Rangers, Aragorn, others like that."
Her eyes were bright in the twilight, full of stars. Full of life, full of the future. Full of the changefulness of mortal things.
"Ow." she said suddenly, tripping over an unseen rock.
Full of the night-blindness of mortal Men.
"Damn. Wish I could see in the dark like Nightcrawler." she said.
A sudden bellow sounded just over our heads. I spun, an arrow trained on a vague shadow in the trees. "Ja, me too."
The shadow moved, and it was one of the herd Daeroch had spotted. They were scattered through the sparse trees, some browsing on high branches, some standing in companionable groups, some dozing. We moved forward, through the brush, counting them. There were young ones; calves? foals? I did not know what to call them. They looked a bit like roch, horses, and a bit like andabon, oliphaunts from far Harad. Elbereth kindled her stars, but I did not have time to study them, to see if we were in a familiar land, or if the stars were strange, for Daeroch charged into the herd with all the grace of...
...of a certain woodland prince, at a very important festival, a festival attended by many lovely young ladies, some from other realms. A woodland prince who was no longer a child, but who had not gained very much wisdom, at least where young ladies were concerned.
The indricotheres milled about, snorting and squealing, snaking their long necks, feinting bites, stomping their tree-trunk legs. Daeroch reared and arched his neck, strutted, paced to and fro, chased, was chased, nibbled, was bitten in return. Dust rose, trees fell. There was little Liz and I could do in such a melee, but watch and learn.
At last, one of the herd came forth; larger she was than Daeroch, and older and wiser. She pinned her ears and snaked her neck and chased him into the bush. He returned, circled, strutting a bit less proudly than before. She chased him again, and this time bit him square on the haunches. He shrank, like a small boy scolded by a queen, paced off and stood in the shadows, alone. The Queen snorted and returned to her herd.
We went to Daeroch, comforted him, rubbing his face, longer than a Noldorin warshield.
"I know just how you feel." Liz said. He let loose a great snort in reply.
"Yes, so do I." I agreed.
She looked up at me in surprise, and disbelief, "How could you? You've never had a single moment of geekiness in your whole immense life."
"Geekiness? You mean doing something that looked foolish? Or unwise..."
"Geeky dorky klutzy frompy just not Black Widow or Princess Leia cool. You know, wrong hair, wrong clothes, wrong car, Wal-Mart instead of the Gap."
"Wal-Mart? Why is Wal Mart not cool?"
"It'd take too long to explain." Her face explained much, but I could feel much more; wistful she was, with a trace of anger, but not at anything within reach.
"Ah. But I have." I told her.
"Have what?"
"Had a moment of geekiness. Or two."
"Like when?" She plainly did not believe it, yet her face looked hopeful.
"There was a festival, long ago. Folk came from kingdoms far beyond the eaves of Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of the Green Leaves. Many were the fair ladies who filled my father's feasting hall, and many were the young Elin who had eyes for them. At the last such festival I had been but a boy. Now I was feeling my...gweth. I do not know what it is in your tongue."
Liz made a wry, understanding face. She pointed at Daeroch, a tall shadow standing sleepy eyed above us. "Anything like him?"
"Ah...yes." It was good that the darkness hid the flush of my cheeks. "The ladies were like the flowers of the forest, many and varied; clad in the blues of the sky and the distant mountains, the greens of spring and deep summer, the russets and reds of leaf-fall. Dark hair and golden, a few silver as snow. Eyes like Elbereth's stars. Skin like..."
"Ok, ok, I get the picture. Gorgeous Elf-women. Liv Tyler, Daughter of Aerosmith, times a zillion." She gave me an annoyed frown.
"Ahhh." Perhaps I was still not very wise when it came to young women, "Ah. Not at all like Daughter of Aerosmith. And beauty is, well...Daeroch is beautiful. The trees are beautiful. The stars." I considered her face for a moment, but did not say what I was thinking. "Beauty has many forms."
She softened a little. "OK, OK, go on."
"There was one. One who stood out from the others as a silver mare stands out from a herd of earth colored chestnuts and bays."
"Yeah, but you're the Fairy Tale Prince. You could have anybody."
"Fairy tale?"
"Like the Little Mermaid."
"Fairy...fair folk...another word your people have for mine...yet there were no Elves in the Little Mermaid. And you have said fairy tale before, as if it is something inferior."
"Those Disney movies are just remakes of the old fairy tales, stuff they tell to little kids. And the old ones didn't always have Elves in them either. Sometimes they are kind of ...I dunno...dumb. But sometimes they're like...uh. Umm." Her words stopped like a butter barrel hung up in a tangle of roots on the riverbank.
"Yes?"
"Uh. Like Galadriel said; history turned legend turned myth. Or something like that."
"Galadriel? Is this from The Book?"
"From the movie."
"Oh. Why am I a fairy tale prince?"
"I dunno, because you were lucky enough to have an Elvenking for a dad? Anyway, the point is, you could have anybody you wanted."
"Why? What makes you say that?"
"BECAUSE!" She said, as if explaining to a very dense child. She did not say the rest of what she was thinking, but her thinking was very loud; 'Because you are beautiful.'
I had felt the weight of her admiration. Now I felt the weight of something else; what I had felt for the beautiful maiden of the Galadhrim at the festival; aniron.
"Ah." I stared at the dark ground. I stared at the stars. Unfamiliar stars after all. Neither ground nor stars held any answers.
Liz curled into a dark ball, arms wrapped around knees, a few feet away; her heart and her thoughts suddenly closed. At last she said, "Well, what about the rest of this story, huh?"
"Ah." I turned to face her, and settled closer. "It was a bit like your festival of Thanksgiving. Only your folk can travel far and fast in your cars; your festival had the briefness of mortal things. The folk who came to Mirkwood that month had traveled slow and far, perhaps for weeks, or longer. They meant to stay..."
"And party hearty, like in the Hobbit."
"Oh?"
"I can't tell you. It hasn't happened yet. Just be nice to the Dwarves. When it does."
"Dwarves?"
"Yeah. Dwarves. One of them is the father of somebody important. Go on..."
"The father...? Very well. There were hunts, and feasts, and news exchanged. Gifts and music and dancing."
"Wine?"
"Of course. How did you know..."
She smiled knowingly, as if she held a great secret. "And very soon the chief of the guards had no keys..."
"What?"
Her face straightened itself. "Ahem. Yeah, go on."
"Is that from the story too?"
She smiled, like a cat who has found the cream.
"Ai." It was very strange, and annoying, when everyone seemed to know what would happen except oneself. "My teachers had worked very hard to teach me new songs and dances, to learn to tell the ancient sagas, and great poems."
"Why do I think they weren't very successful?"
"You read my thoughts too well."
"Nah, just your face."
"No, it is more than that. It's much like the way you can tell what Daer is thinking."
"Oh." She looked at the ground, suddenly embarrassed.
"No, it's a good thing, a gift. I wish I had been better at it then. I wish I had paid more attention to the songs and dances and poetry. To the instruction I was receiving on the making and repair of clothing and gear."
"You learned to make your own clothes?"
"You seem surprised. But there would be many times; traveling alone in other lands for instance, when the Ladies Sewing Circle would not be available."
"So, what were you doing, all this time, instead of doing your homework?"
"Several times other students skilled in tracking had found me in the woods, and returned me, reluctantly to my lessons. The sunlight through the leaves, the songs of the birds, the smell of rain-damp earth, were more appealing than sitting in a stone chamber fixing a tunic. Or repeating a dance as many times as there are hairs on a cat."
"So, did you see any of the giant spiders?"
"I do not remember telling you about those. Are they in the book too?"
"Yeah, they are. I always wanted to see those."
"So did I. That was one of the reasons I wandered far from my father's halls. But when the guests began arriving, there was little time for such wanderings. There were the duties of the King's family to attend to. Guests must be put in comfortable rooms, fed. The household staff must be led in making sure all was in order: firewood, water, clean linens. There were dinners that grew with each day, till we removed them to the forest outside the halls. The halls were really only a sort of fortress anyway, a place to go in danger, or ill weather. A place to store things. Many of our people lived much of the year in the forest."
"In tree-flets, like the Galadhrim?"
"Some. Many used bright tents, pavilions of weatherproof cloth, and there were many times one could simply sleep under the light of the stars filtering down through the leaves. It was on one of the first days of feasting in the halls that I saw the lady with the silver hair. Her presence left me with no tongue to say a single line of a poem, to sing a single note of a song. I shrank behind my brothers and felt..."
"Like a total geek?"
"Yes."
"Wow. Whoda' thunk it?" Her smile held humor and sympathy.
"Fires sprang up and torches were lit in great circles of trees under the stars. There were tales of ages past, tales I had never heard, and some I had heard a thousand times."
"You know, when I say a thousand times, it's kind of an exaggeration. When you say it, I think you really mean it."
I stopped, startled into silence for a moment. "Yes." There were songs I had sung, dances I had done, paths trod a thousand times. More. But for a mortal woman, that would be more than a lifetime of experience. "Ai...many of the stories were ones I had heard since childhood. Others were new, brought to us by the travelers. But I had no ears for the tales, my ears and eyes were on the lady of the silver hair. I tried to think how to get her attention."
"Just walk up and say hi, FaerieTale Prince. Duh."
"I could not."
She studied my face and nodded in sympathy, "Yeah, really. Been there, done that, got the cellphone directory totally lacking in male phone numbers."
"At last my brother dragged me into her presence. She smiled like one of the Valar. Her voice was like the first song of birds in the spring, her..."
"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. What did you do?"
"I studied the forest floor. The path of a bug, the growth pattern of a certain moss under my feet. The faint trace of the track of a fox."
"Brilliant. What did she do?"
"Smiled politely at me and talked to my brother. Danced with a cousin. Flirted with several others. For the rest of the night she did not even notice my existence."
Liz peered at me in the starlight, "I see you finding a way to get her to notice your existence."
"Ah, yes."
"I see it being very messy."
"Yes. I..."
Her eyes widened in surprise, "Spiders. It involved giant spiders..."
"I...yes...well I had spent a lot of time in the woods, following them, learning their ways. I thought I could...well...a few spiders dropping in on our feast, repelled by a brave and daring young prince. That would have got her attention."
"I see you hadn't learned enough about giant spiders."
"Apparently not."
"Oooooh. I can just picture it."
"No. It's worse."
She laughed. "And your father says, 'You are grounded till the end of time as we know it!'"
"Very nearly. And the lessons on sewing that I had neglected; let us say that my repair of my feasting clothes, in particular my pants, did not hold up to the spider onslaught."
"Somehow I don't think that impressed her." She was still laughing. Harder.
"Ai..." It had happened long ago in the way Men look at things, but in my memory it was bright and clear and painfully sharp-edged. "When we finally unwrapped her from the spider silk she turned and went straight home, without even waiting for my father's tailor to make her a new gown."
"Ow." Liz laughed, "I can just see Miss Elf Universe pulling wads of spider goo out of her perfect hair! Whoooo!" She laughed again and looked at my face. And her laugh faded. "Oh." She said. "It wasn't very funny for you at the time, I guess. No. Well, did you ever see her again?"
"No."
"Then there's somebody else, better. Somewhere. Somewhen."
"Yes. That's what my friend Gilien said."
"Who?"
"A girl of the Sylvan folk who often accompanied me on my treks through the woods."
"Oh?"
"No, it's not like that."
"Why not?"
"It's just...it's not, that's all. Besides, now there is another who loves her."
"Oh." She looked at the ground, tried to look disappointed and failed.
Around us the herd had grown quiet as night deepened. Daeroch stood behind us, a great grey slumbering boulder. "They are resting now." I said. "I think nothing will happen among them for awhile. In the morning we could try to get them moving toward the Gate."
Liz nodded, yawned. "Yeah."
"Rest." I suggested.
"And miss all the excitement?"
"I'll wake you if anything happens."
"Promise."
"My word is my promise."
"Do you ever sleep?"
"Yes. But not the way you do."
"Do you really sleep with your eyes open?"
"Is that in The Book too?"
"Yeah." She yawned again. "You know dolphins sleep with half their brains awake. If they slept like we do, they'd forget to breathe and drown. So they sort of drift, with the breathing part awake. weird, huh?"
"Ah. I didn't know that. I hope to meet them someday."
"Huh?" she said sleepily, drooping over her knees.
"Dolphins."
She sat up suddenly, "Dolphins!"
"What?"
"Ahhh, nothing!"
"What!"
"Dolphins, seagulls, ohcrap."
"What are you talking about?"
On her fair face there was great distress. "...gulls..."
"The..."
"...quarry. The seagulls..."
"...I had never met them before..."
"...you saw them! You didn't just see them either..."
"...they sail wonderfully on the wind..."
"...your eyeballs were glued to them!"
"...and their voices are beautiful..."
"...and on the ones in the marsh too!"
"...they speak to me of..."
"...the sea!" Liz wailed.
"What?"
Her words poured out like a spring flood on the Forest River. "...and we can't just send you back to Middle-earth, because then you'll just sail west and never go on the quest with..." she stopped. "With everybody you're supposed to go on the Quest with!"
I fell silent as her, staring at her in the dark, trying to comprehend her mighty distress and failing. At last I asked, "What has that got to do with seagulls?"
"The Sea-longing. You see the gulls, hear them, in the dark even, and wham, you're waxing poetic over western sunsets and building a ship."
"That's preposterous."
"Well it was in The Book."
"The Book? You are speaking of the future. A possible future. The Sea-longing lies buried in the hearts of all my kindred, or so it is said, and there are those of our folk, and others, such as the ones we know in Imladris, who have answered the Call, and sailed west out of the World. But when and where... and if... it is answered is something only the Valar can tell. And except for this journey, I have never traveled far from Mirkwood. I have lived in joy under those great trees, known peace among the beeches and elms and oaks of that mighty and tangled wood. I have no wish to leave it."
"Oh." She studied my face closely, "Really?"
"Yes."
Her worry shifted to relief, then to hope. "So the gulls at the quarry didn't, well, waken any urge to stick a cutlass in your belt and set your sails?"
"No. They were new to me, so I watched them closely, if that's what you mean. Come fair maiden of the Edain! Flag your tail and laugh as your wolf-friend Kodi would do. If that is the path the Story must take, we will find that Path again and set things right!"
She nodded, and lumped her parka into a sort of pillow. The night was chill for her kind, and we were far from the fire. I moved next to her and drew her up on my knee, tucking her parka around her. For a moment she was startled, then she curled against me like a kitten. The stars in their strange patterns circled across the sky, and I sang to them. A song I had sung a thousand times. One my people had sung for ages before me.
It occurred to me that if she was right about the little furry things with tails, it was the first time that song had ever been heard here.
Who are you?
No one important.
The tall female stretched her neck and raised her head as high as it would go. Insignificant speck, I could crush you into dust without a thought.
I know. I know your power, your wisdom. I am no threat to your young ones.
What sort of strange creature are you? The great head tilted, regarding me with first one brown eye, then the other. Then it dove out of the sky, swooped to within a hand'sbreadth of my chest and sniffed; a great whoosh of air, I nearly expected to see flames shoot out, like one of the dragons in the old tales. Behind me Liz let out an exclamation of terror and delight. Ahead of us the sky glowed with the first purples and reds of dawn.
I am one of the Firstborn, I wanted to tell her, but it seemed a foolish thing to say to this mighty beast, living in a world which would not see any sort of two-legged people for ages which even my folk would count as long.
We're lost.
Liz's voice was clear as if she had spoken, but not only to me, to the great herd matriarch towering over us as well.
Ok, well really, he's lost. And it's my fault. It's too long to explain, but the only way we can get him home is to get some of your friends here to go with us through the Gate to this really cool place with lots to eat; good shady trees, nice streams, and, oh yeah, no hyaenodons.
"Perhaps we should have taken a bit longer with the explanation..." I suggested.
"If we left it up to the Elves, we'd be here till those fuzzy guys evolved into something else."
"Hmph."
The Matriarch sniffed at Liz, then raised her head back into her tree as if we had never been.
"Well, that was useful." Liz said.
"Indeed." I studied the Matriarch, nipping off a bushel of leaves at a time. I thought of the Onodrim in the songs of my people; gigantic, old and wise. And likely just as unconcerned with the doings of Elves and Men. "Come." I said to Liz, "Let us speak to the others." We set out through the open spaces between the trees, powdery with dirt and low-growing plants ground into dust by the indriks tree-bole legs.
"Whoa, watch out for the..."
Squelch.
"...road apples. Although they look a lot more like beetles."
"You are thinking of those funny little round cars." I said, rubbing my boot on the bent and broken meadow plants. "These...road apples are much the same size."
"Yeah. I thought it'd be cool to take an indrik home, but think of the stall cleaning."
"They are wild things. With their own minds. Not bred to the service of Man or Elf." We made our way to another few indriks browsing among the trees. They tilted their heads and looked down at us, then went back to browsing. Liz reached into a pocket and pulled out some of the Grandmothers' waybread. She handed me half.
We wandered among them, and watched them browse, converse with one another, feed their youngest; the sun rose over the edge of the round world, the sky brightened from deep red to a blaze of fire, to brilliant blue. We sipped from our water bottles, and tried to talk to others in the herd. Some were curious, especially the young ones. Most thought we were strange; too small to be truly dangerous, but annoying, like large insects, or the little furry things that sometimes threw things at them from the trees. Long ago I had learned from my father, and from many patient horses, to listen twice as much as I talked. Liz, for all her short years was of the same mind. But as we watched and listened, they went on browsing, with barely a glance to acknowledge our presence. Or they snorted, like thunder, in warning if we came too close. Some stamped their tree-bole legs, or even swung haunches the size of fortress gates toward us.
Go away little bugs.
Liz and I retreated to a fallen tree; one that bore the marks of indrik teeth, one whose exposed roots spoke of hungry indriks pushing it over to reach the succulent upper leaves. We sat, watching a very young one nurse, while two older ones capered like foals.
"You know, those people on Animal Planet and stuff, the ones who follow elephant herds and write books about them, they do this for years..."
"...they follow the herds till they are accepted. I have ridden after wild horses with the Eotheod, and they do much the same. But it takes time. And even wild horses are not really wild. Their grandfathers were fed, and stabled, and protected from predators by people, and they remember this. The indriks do not. It will take a long time maybe..."
"...even for an Elf?"
I was silent for awhile. Too long a while for Liz it seemed.
"Legolas?"
"Hmmm. Not so long for me, maybe. But for you..."
Every head within sight suddenly turned, ears and eyes fixed on a small cloud of dust headed our way. Lorien and the others came to a halt a hundred strides away.
Not getting very far, are we? Tas strode over to us.
Go ahead. I told her. Try your own luck. Perhaps you will do better, they are horse relatives. You know horses well enough to become one.
She looked up at them, Daer was easy enough. But he is young, curious. He hopes we can help him with his girlfriend problem. These grandmothers will not be so easy to convince. Ah, I see you've already discovered this.
Hmph.
"What?" Lorien said, coming up behind Tas. "Will you two talk out loud already!"
I turned to her in surprise. "Sorry, mellon nin, I did not mean to leave you out of the conversation."
She shrugged, "It's ok." She came and sat by my feet, "Do you do that much at home? Talk without speaking, I mean."
"Sometimes. Yes."
Her voice was soft, tinged with sadness."You miss them."
"Yes."
"Well," Tas said, striding toward the nearest indricothere, "Guess I'll try my luck."

The sun rose and sailed across the sky, and Tas had no better luck than Liz and I had.. We sat in the shade of the trees, or wandered among the indriks, trying with no more success to speak to the great beasts. We learned much of their lives, their thought, their favorite leaves, the things that annoyed them; furry things in trees who threw things, bloodsucking bugs, predators that made wargs seem weak. But none of us came nearer to convincing them to follow us, no matter how beautifully we described the place we wanted to take them to.
The day turned white hot, the dust rose as the indriks began to move. I turned to Liz, "They are heading for..."
"...water." Liz said.
"They are moving fast." Kurtvagner observed. "We're going to need our bus. I just hope they don't try to wreck it."

Lorien
We swayed through the bush on Daer's broad back, Legolas once more perched on his head like a sailor on a bowsprit. We followed at a safe distance, one the females seemed to think appropriate for a young male, one unsuitable as a suitor for their daughters. This time the stream was a much bigger one. Legolas told us it was the one where he'd seen the Gators of Doom. The indriks found a broad area with a low bank, and gravel and rock, not mud. The water was shallow here, and crocless; the crocs seemed to like it better upstream in the deep pools. We filled our water bottles and the Elves, and Liz, who was practically one of them by now, spent a fruitless afternoon trying to talk sense into the world's biggest land-walking grandmothers. Snorkeling with blue whales and speaking like Dory would have been easier.
The sun sailed down the far side of the sky, and the shadows lengthened. Legolas stood on the bank, silent and thoughtful as a young tree on a windless night. He stared at the sinking sun, his lithe shape magnificently silhouetted against an ever more colorful sky. I came up beside him, snapping pictures as I went.
"You cannot stay here forever." he said softly. "But I can stay as long as we need. Ahad, cuil, haran inath in Edain."
A month, a life, a hundred years of Men. I stared at him open-mouthed. "What? You can't either! The Dragonkin won't let us through without the indriks."
"They won't give you the spell without the indriks. You can go back." He smiled, "Tas will see to it, there is little that can stop her once she decides to do something. And you can take Daeroch. Tell them there are more coming. I will bring the rest. Eventually."
"That's absolutely out of the question!"
He turned to me, regarding me with those bottomless sea-grey eyes.
"No way. Uh uh. Avam! Nein. Forget it."
He opened his mouth.
"Forget it! We're the Indricothirrim. The Fellowship of the Prehistoric Mammal."
"You may have noticed, though water is plentiful, we have a limited amount of waybread."
"So shoot something. We'll eat it."
"You're a vegetarian. Anyway, it could be somebody's ancestor."
"Ok, so we'll all go vegetarian. If we can figure out what's safe to eat here. Anyway. We''ll think of something. Even if we have to rope them all or...something."
He gave me a wry look, one eyebrow cocked and loaded. "Where are you going to get the rope?"

The sun shot a few last blasts of amber and magenta into the high clouds. I found Legolas kneeling in the growing dusk, singing something low and mournful, like Pippin's song in Return of the King.
Legolas had indeed shot something. Something not mammalian, just in case it might be somebody's ancestor.
"What are you doing?" I asked, when he fell silent.
"It is a song to the spirit of the creature, for giving its life so we may continue ours. And to Araw the Hunter, for teaching us The Way."
"Ah." I said.
He looked up at me, his eyes dark and unreadable. "You think it strange..."
"No, the prayer thing makes sense. Traditional Native American people do something like that. It''s just..." it was alive. It was something you could probably talk to. Like I wish I could.
"The plants you eat are no less alive. No less part of Eru's creation."
"Ah." Yeah. These are the people who woke up trees and taught them to talk.
"I did not mean to make it sound as if your way is wrong." he said.
"Well, I guess your way isn't either. After all, it was a Vala who taught your people."
He smiled and picked up the lizardy looking thing, nearly half as long as he was tall. He headed for the fire someone had already started. "I don't suppose you want some of this?" he said to me.
I made a face. "Hardly."
"Don't worry. Tas has been looking for something for you. I just hope it isn't the ancestor of your strawberries, or brussel sprouts."
"If it is, I hope it's brussel sprouts."

Tas had collected enough edible vegetables for a good veggie stew. None of them were anything I'd seen in a supermarket or garden, but there was apparently some sort of Elvish talent for discerning whether something was edible or poisonous. There was a decided lack of dinnerware though, so, like Tom Hanks character in CastAway, we had to reinvent fire, and the cooking pot. Not too hard since many of our Fellowship had been around in that chunk of history... or one like it. Eventually we had a nice veggie stew and the mystery critter roasting on a stick.
I was almost hungry enough to eat it.
"I think we should just use Nightcrawler's bamf to spook them into moving where we want, drive them to the Gate that way." Liz said through a mouthful. "Like a big cattle drive."
"Probably with stampedes and all." Tas said. "Legolas had the best idea. Leave the Elves here long enough to convince them to go on their own."
The Elves being her and Legolas. "But..."
"We'd probably end up back at the quarry about five minutes after you guys." Tas said. "Even if we were here for a century."
"You don't know that." I said.
She shrugged.
"Try it Nighty, see if the bamf works on the others." I said.
He hunched across the fire from me, only his glowing eyes visible in the shadows, like one of the predators just beyond the safe circle of the firelight. "There is something not quite...fael...about that. Frightening them into doing our bidding."
"Liz?" I said. She was hunched next to Legolas, staring into the fire, motionless, like the Elf sleeping with his eyes open.
"Liz?"
"Huh? Oh...yeah Mrs. Smeed, I got stuck in traffic, in the Oligocene. Tas, you're not at all sure how time flows between this world and ours, are you?"
"You don't even know where we actually are." I said.
"The stars are not the same." Legolas suggested.
"They change positions every two thousand years or so," I said, "The creatures we're seeing are from at least twenty-five million years ago. The stars are unrecognizeable."
"They're the same in our world as in Middle-earth, aren't they?" Liz asked.
"Yes." Legolas said.
"And in the X-Universe?" I said to Kurt.
"Ja." Kurt said.
"It could still be some weird alternate universe thingie, not the past." Liz said.
"Could be." Tas said. She ripped off another piece of Mystery Critter and wolfed it down.
"Wonder, if it is, if they become extinct here too." Liz said.
I sat up straight. "Whoa."
"Yeah." Liz said, smiling as if she'd read my thought.
"Too bad they can't get a case of the Sea-Longing and sail west, straight through our Gate." The Gate that actually did lie several leagues to the west at this point. "I mean, They're not going to be here forever..."
"Just another few million years, that's all." Kurt said.
"One year, or a million. It means nothing to them." It was Legolas who had spoken, softly, his eyes focused on something in, or beyond the fire before him.
"Yeah." Liz said, an idea dawned on her face, "Their time sense is kinda' like horses...or Elves." She glanced at Tas for confirmation, Tas gave her a faint knowing smile through her mouthful of Mystery Critter. "The ever-present now..."
"...another ripple in the Stream of Time, ever repeated." Legolas said.
"What happens," I suggested, "if we tell them that, if they stay here, they'll be extinct tomorrow?"

Into the West
But Arod, the horse of Rohan, refused the way, and he stood sweating and trembling in a fear that was grievious to see. Then Legolas laid his hands on his eyes and sang some words that went soft in the gloom, until he suffered himself to be led, and Legolas passed in.

Lorien
The words were soft, like wind whisper, but all across the great dusty landscape grey heads the size of refrigerators reared above their trees, leaf-shaped ears flicked forward, listening. It was an ancient song, and my knowledge of Elvish couldn't encompass all the words. But words weren't necessary. As it had, when Finrod sang to the first Men, the song went beyond words, to pictures in the mind, to feelings in the heart. It had the pull of gull voices in the dark, of distant white shores. It held the ache of a world changed, one that no longer had room for such great and mighty creatures. They listened, flicked their great and mighty ears and went back to browsing, to pulling down whole trees, to nursing their young, to chasing off predators, to head-butting contests between young males.
But the Song did not falter. The Song did not stop. The Song went on and on, and round and round. Like the Native songs at the Thanksgiving dinner. Or the ones they sang at the sundances I'd been to. The song that goes on and on, round and round. Soon I knew the rhythm and the notes and the words. And my own voice joined without me asking it to; floating over Legolas' like gulls over the deep notes of the sea. The great heads turned toward us once more, then away, then toward us more often. Skeins of birds flew overhead, circled and flew by again. The twittering song of small birds in the bush warbled in harmony. A distant booming call punctuated the song like drums. There was no Time, no Thirst, no Hunger. There was only the Song going round and round. We sang the sun across the sky, and down to the edge of the round round world.
And the Matriarch came. She slid up to us in great silent running strides, halted, haunches under her, like Beo about to do a pirouette: poised to run in any direction...over us, or away. She stared down at us, a huge tower of dark against a blood-red sky. Legolas did not look up, and the song continued, like wind in the grass. My voice swirled, danced with his; gulls and surf. I felt, rather than saw the shadow beside me, then Liz was standing at the Matriarch's feet, looking up. The great head dipped, the great dark eyes fixed on Liz, then on Legolas and me, as if she was telling us something. Something only Elves could hear.
She turned and was gone into the dark. The song trailed off into the sounds of rustling in the bush, nightwind, insects, a distant scream.
I stood, breathless, unable to say a single word. Someone handed me a water bottle, Kurt. I swallowed the water like I'd never had any before. I couldn't remember having any all day, just being in the spell of the Song. I stared into the dark bush. Empty. Silent.
Kurt edged forward, staring into the dark. Then he turned to us, his teeth and eyes a pale predatory gleam in the dark. "They're coming."
They materialized out of the dark bush, moving mountains shaking the earth like a distant quake. The whole herd it seemed was there, gliding in their ground-covering running walk. I felt a hand on my shoulder, "Mae carnen! Lorien."
I looked up into Legolas' starlit eyes, "Wha...who me?"
"Yes. I did not do it alone."
"Move!" Tas said. And the closest mountains were on us. She caught my hand and... Phoomph!
We were at Daeroch's feet, Tas looked up at him, as if saying something to him silently, and he lowered his head. She pulled me up onto him, and slid us down to his withers. A bamf behind me and we were moving through the dark.
"What about Liz, Legolas?"
"We have to keep Daeroch out of their way." Tas said. "They'll have to catch their own bus."

enephae: Legolas
I had not yet met the Onodrim, or the great war-andabon of Harad. I had never seen the Huorns walk, or faced the wrath of balrog or troll; so these great mountains moving through the dark filled me with wonder and...
Liz reached for my hand, gave it a solid squeeze, the reassuring touch of a swordsister. "You feel like I do." she said softly.
Like standing before a towering sea, one no seawall could stop, one no ship could ride. Daeroch was young, a mere pup. These were the hounds who could bring down the mightiest stag. "Noro!"I said and drew Liz with me. We leapt from the Matriarch's path, letting her pass like a great wave in the dark. We fell in behind her, knowing she would clear a path we could follow even without moon or stars. There were stars this night, and a slice of moon. They turned the grey-green things that grew near the ground to silver. Dust rose like mist. The bush fell silent as the herd rumbled by. I saw the glint of eyes in the dark, predators who other times would wait for a young straggler, or one too weak to go on. Tonight they saw Power too great for them to touch, and turned and fled from our path.
We ran through the night, through rising dust, the footfalls of the indriks like deep drumbeats, like the roar of the Forest River before it is seen through the trees. They knew the way from my song. From our song; the Song Lorien and I had made, for it took the voices of both kindreds, of Eldar and Edain, to speak to these mighty beasts. Daeroch ran ahead, for he was light and swift, and the three on his back slowed him not at all. Liz and I plunged through dust and dark and plain and stream on foot. Our eyes stung with the dust, and our throats were choked with it, even though we ran as far to the side of the herd as we could. At last a small indrik slowed and paced alongside us. She looked down at us with curiosity, as she had before, hours ago, under the sun. She was young, half the size of the Matriarch, even smaller than Daeroch, but her back was well above the choking dust.
Come little bugs, and her thought was full of laughter and sunlight, if you stay there, my big clumsy brother will step on you. Then I'll never hear your pretty song again.
The young indrik lowered her head and we swung up onto her withers. She skipped, like a playful foal and Liz laughed.
Watch, I can outrun that big lump. And she slid past her brother, head held high. And so we moved on through the night, part of a great flowing river of immense life, one not even the hordes of Mordor could have stopped.

Lorien
"This may be a dumb time to ask this," I looked back, I could hear the rumble of the herd behind us, like the huge wave that sank Numenor, "but how do we get our Dragonkin buddy to open the Gate?"
"Ja," Kurt said, "the indriks will be as easy to turn around as the X-Jet at top speed."
"If Legolas and Liz can turn them at all, which is doubtful!" The herd rumble was more than sound now, it filled the air, flowed through the ground. Daeroch halted as if in answer to an unspoken command, he fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot, ears twitching.
Tas slid off Daeroch's back, landed in a crouch and ran. Rocks, trees, bunches of spikey plants shining silver in the moonlight. It all looked alike. Maybe she could remember the name of the individual rock that had guarded the Gate, or knew the scent of that particular piece of soil. I hoped so anyway. "If you're looking for the opportune moment," she shouted away from us into thin air, "this would be it!"
I crouched on Daeroch's withers, Kurt a reassuring warmth behind me. And just behind him, the ever-louder avalanche rumble of the herd.
I turned and stared into the dark; navy sky, darker shapes of looming trees, pale groundcover, all a blotchy blur. "Kurt; Legolas and Liz...?"
I felt cool air swirl around me as he stood, then vaulted over me and ran up Daer's neck, light and sure as Legolas. His smile flashed pale in the dark, "They caught a ride." The smile vanished."Ach, mist." He turned to Tas, his voice had an edge to it, "About that Gate..."
"I'm working on it!" She snapped. "Dragonkin ESP 101 was not one of my best subjects!" She stood, tight as a drawn bow, yellow and white hair turned to a mass of silver under the moon and stars.
"Whatthehell are you doing, having a coffee break?!" She shouted at the night.
The ground under us was definitely trembling, it felt the way I imagined the sand of a beach would feel right before the tsunami hit.
Kurt ran back down Daeroch's neck, took up his place behind me. The indrik half turned, ears twitching, coiled on his haunches. Kurt's hands closed around my waist. "Hang on liebes, we may have to just get out of the way."
And we'll never be able to round them up again. I could see them now behind us, silver moondust with dark mountain shapes looming in it.
Daeroch snorted, scuttled sideways, and I looked over his ears.
The air in front of us shimmered, shifted, and tuned itself into someplace else. The Dragonkin scout stood in the middle of our path, chewing on something recently deceased. Her eyes widened as she stared up at the bulk of Daeroch towering before her. Her eyes moved past him, to the dark behind us and widened even farther. Tas stepped through the Gate, grabbed the carcass and flung it away. "Bad time for a coffee break." she snapped. She grabbed the Dragonkin and vanished out of our path with a faint phoomph.
That left the Greenhorn of Doom, me, in charge of one fidgety oversized cowpony. If he spooked, or turned aside from the Gate, the others might too. Especially if Nightcrawler had to 'port me out of the way. I could feel his hands tighten on my waist. No that would spook them all. I thought of Pumpkin, of all Legolas and Liz had taught me of the Elvish Way With All Good Beasts; "Come on Daeroch!" I shifted my weight, tightened my legs and and dug my heels into his shoulders. "Noro! Noro lim!" He straightened and shot forward, gliding through the Gate with only a passing snort. Behind us the herd came on like thunder, like a great sea wave, like the River Isen breaking the walls at Isengard, and poured through the Gate.

Once more, we stood on the shore of the quarry, and Jon, Bran, Ian, Doc, Zan, Monica and the Sun hadn't moved noticeably since we'd left, days ago.
"Le abdollen. You're late." Bran's eyes scanned Tas' disheveled X-Suit, matted mudded hair, and assorted scrapes. His expression changed subtly; more amusement than sympathy. "You look terrible," he said in Legolas' Two Towers voice.
"Eat my swamp-goo encrusted shorts, Bird-boy." She gave his cheek an affectionate pat; one that made him sway and left a smear of goo along one perfect Elvish cheekbone.
Jon raised a questioning eyebrow.
Liz stepped forward, her words running together like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. "Foundthe Dragonkin climbed downamountain trekkedacrossthe NotNearlyDeadEnoughMarshes withgiant bloodsuckingbugs wentthroughaGate contributedtotheextinctionofthehyaenodon trainedanindricothere roundedupseveralmore drovethembackthroughtheGateintoDragonkinworld and hereweare."
Jon raised both eyebrows.
"Oh yeah, and we got the spell."
Monica looked shocked, distraught and royally peeved all in about two and a half seconds. "Noooooo!" she wailed.
Yeah, really. Mission accomplished. We got the spell. It was locked in Legolas' head...and mine. It was a song, and we were the two singers. We had the Dragonkin feathers, and the location of the Gate. We could open that Gate now and send the Prince of Mirkwood back to his kingdom, and Nightcrawler back to the X-Men.
I felt just like I had the day after Return of the King premiered. It was done, it was complete. The Ring was destroyed. The Shire was saved. The Elves had sailed into the west.
It was over.
I stared at the little brig, still rocking gently in the turquoise waters of the quarry; the familiar deck and rigging where we'd stood beside our heroes and swashed and buckled and kicked Monica's butt so long ago. The stinging in my eyes wasn't from the wind.
Doc glanced at his wrist, up at the ragtag band of hearty adventurers before him, and back at his wrist. His face registered something like disbelief. "Five minutes and thirty-eight seconds."
It wasn't possible for Jon's eyebrows to go up any farther but they did. "So the Dragonkinworld is what we thought, a pocket dimension, a sort of backeddy in the Stream of Time."
"Useful information for Gatesingers." Bran said.
We told them the whole tale as we headed back to the quarry's dive shop to collect Kodi and Shenzi. We had a lot of useful information for the Gatesingers... and everyone else, stuff they had only guessed at concerning the Dragonkin. And a Gateworld they had never been to; the one that looked just like the Oligocene. Zan dismantled his brig, but not before I'd taken some shots of it on the little digital camera that had traveled through several worlds. Bran flew off under his own wingpower, and returned with the Ravin' Maniac, and vanished again with Monica safely stowed within. Zan's fine freight sled returned to its component branches and duct tape, and was recycled in a brief campfire. Tas 'ported, then returned to the quarry with the Windrider, and by early evening, we stood on the porch of the Grandmothers' farmhouse at Hawk Circle again.
Delphi opened the door, smiling her hugely impossible marsupial smile. "You're just in time for supper dears, come in." Her bright eyes flicked over the familiar forms of me and Liz, Legolas behind us, Ian, Tas, Doc, Jon, and two very hungry dogs. Behind her in the warm glow of the kitchen Bran gave us a conspiratorial smile. As he had promised, he hadn't told them a thing.
Yet.
Delphi's eyes fell on the one member of our Fellowship she had not yet met. Nightcrawler.
Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened like a five year old's on Christmas morning. "Oh my!" She giggled and jumped up and down like a little kid meeting her favorite hero, then shouted back into the house, "Cora! Aura! Come quick! You're not going to believe this!"
We sat around the Grandmothers' table, full of food and candlelight and talk. When we asked where Monica was, they would only reply, 'somewhere safe'. Delphi sat by Kurt, her tail, at odd moments, twining with his. Cora and Aura had brought a stack of X-Men comics, which he gleefully signed. We told our tale, our words piling over each other like exuberant puppies. Kodi and Shenzi yawned under the table, wolfing down the odd tidbit sneaked under the tablecloth.
I noticed the one who gave them the most was Legolas.
We sang the Gatesong for the Gatesingers, so they would know it too, for it would take more than one of us to open it. And it could only be opened at a certain place. And at a certain time. With the Dragonkin feathers Ashnarii had given us in thanks for the fine herd that would grace her lands for centuries to come. Some of those feathers had come from her juvenile delinquents, and one had come from her own crest.
The Gate was on an island in the middle of the Great River, our river, the Susquehanna. Just a big rock, really, not even big enough to park an SUV on. Native American people had known it long ago, and had marked it with their pictographs. The only way there was in a small, sea-worthy boat. And now, in December, the water would be cold and rough, or frozen.
Just as well we didn't have to think about it until spring.

Dances With Elves
(Journey...and Johnny and Aerosmith and whatever...in the Dark)
enephae-a-min: Legolas
Legolas moved through the last of his knife form, hands and body flowing with the grace of a dancing cat. Gimli leaned on the ship's rail, no longer afraid of the roll and pitch of the deck, or the spray that leapt like a rose-tinted fountain before him. The sun vanished over the western edge of the known world, and Elbereth kindled her stars again.
"I think I can see..." Gimli began, squinting into the west.
Legolas came to stand beside him, laid a gentle hand on his shoulder and shook his head. "There are still days of travel left, mellon nin."
"Oh." Gimli sighed. Then turned and looked up at the tall Elf. "When the Dark Lord was defeated, there was still a great deal of story left to tell." Gimli said hopefully.
Legolas smiled, "My tale is not over yet."
They had a great Yule celebration that night. The bank barn to the west of Hawk Circle was weathered black by rain and years. It was not so old as a Dwarf delving, nor Elven halls, but it was ancient to these folk. Great timbers framed a vast space, dark stone formed the ends, and hand-hewn planks formed the other walls. The roof was covered with slate so well-crafted that it might have been hewn by Dwarves. Once the lowest level, protected by the earth itself, would have housed cattle and horses. The great space above would have kept enough hay and straw for a year. The center aisle would have kept carriages and wagons safe from weather. Now it stood empty.
Except for the dragon.
She was not one of the great evil worms of Morgoth's realm, or the fire-spewing gold-hoarding Smaug. She was of an ancient race, wise as the Valar themselves. Akin to their kind. Her scales shown like moonlit night sky, and her eyes were vast pools of memory. When she took on human form, she was a dark haired woman of small stature, dark almond eyes, golden skin...
And enough strength barehanded, to stop Smaug in his tracks. It was she I had heard roar many nights before when we entered Hawk Circle for the first time.
She and the others had strung endless garlands of greens throughout the great hall that was usually hers. The garlands were lit with tiny lights like stars, they glittered with gold and silver and red and purple and deep blue, ribbons and bells and balls. A live tree stood at the end of the barn by a great hearth, roots in a sleeping ball wrapped in burlap. Tannenbaum, Kurtvagner called it. It nearly bowed under the weight of the gleaming treasures on its branches. A table was spread with enough food to feed an army of starving Dwarves. And around the tree were stacked boxes in fantastic colors and patterns, holding gifts for all. A raised platform stood at one end, near the tree, and upon it musicians played all manner of wonderful music, the likes of which I had heard only on their radio, or CDs.
The Elves of Hawk Circle and the Elf-friends arrived in a variety of finery such as has never been seen anywhere in Middle-earth since the wedding of the King. There were the Three Grandmothers, and Charlie Durgin the Dwarf and ,many of his kin, including his daughter, Earla, come from a long study abroad. Dana and even Shenzi and Kodi, scanning the buffet table for treats. There were other Edain who volunteered with the Earth Life Foundation, ones who knew the true nature of the place.
Kurtvagner wanted Zan to place an illusion on him, so he could blend in with the others, but they told him many children, and no few adults, would rather meet the Incredible Nightcrawler in his true form.
In my own kingdom I would have known what to wear to such an important event, but here I was at a loss. It was Bran who shapeshifted a fine tunic and boots, like the ones a certain actor had worn in the film of our tale, the way Tas had made Morathradon's leathers.
And Tas saw to it that the young ladies were not left out in the bargain bin.
They came through the door with Tas between them.
The three women warriors that I had fought alongside, that had risked their lives for me, that would strike fear into the heart of any Dragonkin of Mordor or Yrch County...were replaced by something...
...indescribable.

Lorien
We caught sight of Legolas kneeling by the tree, examining one of the glass ornaments. Tas' hand was tight on my shoulder, or I might have turned tail and fled like Cinderella at midnight. The night-sky blue dress fit as only Tas could make it fit, but the last time I'd worn heels was to a funeral.
"The mantra is what?" Tas said in my ear.
"I am a hottie." I said, doing my best to smile.
She nodded, and swung her hips a bit more than necessary. Liz wobbled and nearly tripped over her spikey shoes.
"Yeah, hottie." Liz said grimly. "At least I'm not wearing a corset."
"Warp speed, girls." Tas beamed. Then she corrected herself, "Women." She eyed the Elf at the far end of the hall. Her teeth showed a little, like Shenzi calculating the potential direction and velocity of a squirrel in her yard. She looked terrifyingly awesome; something like finely wrought golden chainmail flowed over every perfect curve, ending in a sweep of mail so fine it moved like a sea wave. Our own dresses were the same material; pooka mail Liz called it. Liz looked pretty awesome too.
No, really awesome. Once you got her out of her barn boots, she looked like she could have the latest cover model slash impossible actress brainfart for breakfast.
Just above us came the familiar sound of imploding air, and a waft of sulpherous scent. Nightcrawler swan-dived out of mid-air to land soundlessly in front of us. He was clad in close-fitting breeches and boots, and the kind of loose-sleeved white shirt that works for pirates and gypsies and romantic swashbuckling heroes. One gold earring flashed on one pointy blue ear, and a red, fur-trimmed Santa hat hid half his indigo curls. He bowed, flashed a huge smile and said, "Ladies, you look fantastich!" He kissed each of our hands, complimenting us in three more languages.
Tas smiled, almost demurely, cupped his cheek in her hand and kissed him.
And kissed him and kissed him...
His golden eyes went wide but his tail wound itself around her waist, the end twitching in delight.
Liz just stood there blushing, her leaf-green dress pouring over her like liquid spring sunlight. "Gawd I feel stupid." she said.
"You look fantastich. Nighty said so."
"Yeah, I'm gonna look fantastich when I fall on my..."
"What is The Mantra?"
"Ja, I am a hottie." Liz didn't quite look like she actually believed it.
Legolas had stood up and was now staring at us across the room, his mouth open in astonishment. A moment later he was moving across the room, that tunic the color of live water flowing with every move. He stood before us, bowing with the grace of a prince, but no swan-dives. He met my eyes, then his swept down the length of my dress and back up. He left eyetracks on Liz as well. Maybe a few more.
His face composed itself, but he found no words to say for a whole thirty seconds. At last he did find words, and it was a whole poem in Sindarin, directed at both of us.
All three of us.
All two of us. I lifted my eyes from Legolas' just long enough to see Tas sashaying off to the buffet table. Oh great, leave the Geek Patrol on its own. We're doomed.
No, leaving us to our princes. I'd have to find a way to thank her later.

enephae-a tad: Legolas
At the far end of the hall musicians struck up a merry tune. I caught Lorien's hand and swept her onto the floor. She was round and cheerful as any Hobbit, but she could dance like Luthien. I fell into the rhythm of one of the old dances of Mirkwood, and she followed, laughing and stepping as light as butterflies, despite the odd shoes she was wearing. Behind us, Morathradon, the one called Kurtvagner, swept Liz into the dance, she wobbled on her own peculiar shoes, then kicked them off and spun in mad circles with the blue Elf, the Luinda.

Lorien
The music changed from bawdy sea-songs, to merry Yule tunes, to haunting Celtic airs; the kind of mix you'd find on the street of a Renaissance Faire...with a little Johnny Cash and Garth Brooks and Journey and Aerosmith and Yes and classic Beatles thrown in, just to keep things interesting. I could feel the sweat starting on my face, and hoped Tas was right about the makeup being waterproof. If Elves sweat, they don't do it dancing, Legolas looked cool as a cat.
Tas cut in on a few of the slowish ones, pulling Legolas close as a saddle on a horse. He didn't seem to mind too much, matching her every step and sway. A few other women, including all three grandmothers Elf-napped him for some of the other songs. Bran swept by and whirled me off into one dance, wild as a flight in a hurricane. I caught sight of Zan and a group of kids going all YouTube viral video at one end of the room, a little one in a wheelchair being spun in circles by one of the others. A tall Native American looking guy, white spots at his temples blending into a knee-length black braid, stood by a somewhat larger wheelchair containing a bare-chested twenty-something blond guy whose bottom half was clad in something that looked exactly like a swordfish's tail.
It took me a minute to realize it probably wasn't a costume.
And there was something eerily familiar about the white streaks in the big guy's hair. It took another minute to realize they reminded me of orca eyespots.
Jon... Aiwei son of whatever... looked as awesome as King Thingol himself. He was slow-dancing with a lean, outdoorsy thirty-something woman, his girlfriend the rehabber. Give the guy credit for taste; she didn't look a bit like a Barbie or Brittany. She was beautiful the way a hawk was, all earth and sky and sharp edges. Doc was enthroned by the hearth with three younger Dwarves, and a lot of beer. Two of those were women, and they did not have beards. Kurt had escaped the admiring crowd of kids (who had cornered him almost instantly upon his arrival) and was doing a completely indescribable dance with Liz, then one of the E.L.F. volunteers, then with Delphi.
Two dancers with tails has to be seen to be believed.
Then a couple of the kids kidnapped him again and and I heard the sounds of bamfing and laughter in the rafters high above us.
I caught sight of Legolas with the YouTube crowd, gesturing broadly as if telling a story. Ian stood nearby, telling the same tale in American Sign Language. The band went into overdrive, and Delphi waltzed over and caught Legolas' hand, wrapping her tail around his waist. So he couldn't escape, I guess. He finally did escape, dragging me away from the buffet table. I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Dana dancing with the tall guy that reminded me of an orca.
I wondered if any of the Grandmothers' relatives could shapeshift into anything that big. Oh wait, Dragon Woman... so... yeah. Hmmmm.
Another haunting Celtic air started up, and I stood still. The only guy I'd ever slow-danced with was some dorky twelve-year old in dance lessons. Legolas cocked his head, eyebrows a question mark, and held out a hand.
Ulp. Uhhhhhhhh. Well...Yeah. OK. Why not.
Because you are not a hottie and you will look like a total dork.
As if on cue, Tas swept by, "Hottie." she stage-whispered.
I did the scariest thing I'd done yet on this adventure. I took his hand.
He drew me close, then swept me into the kind of slow graceful swan-moves Great Disney Moments are made of. The themes from Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella and half a dozen others went reeling through my head all at once. I reached out a mental foot and kicked over the boombox with the Disney soundtracks...
...misty Celtic flute music washed over me. It sounded a lot like the Rohan part of the soundtrack from Two Towers. Wait...it was the Rohan music...

enephae-a-nel: Legolas
The music shifted, and Kurtvagner appeared before me, with Liz in tow. He bowed and asked if he could dance with my lady.
My lady? No, mellon nin, you have been dancing with my lady. But I would not see Lorien of the Gentle Heart left standing by the buffet table. And besides, she dances beautifully.
"And what does my lady wish?" I said to Lorien.
"Ah...ah..." Was all she would say.

Lorien
I am a hottie.
I am a hottie.
I am a hottie.
I am a hottie.
I am a hottie.
So you've been dancing for the last hour...intermittently...with the Prince of Mirkwood. Why in Middle-earth is the Blue Elf making you incapable of ordinary sensible speech?

enephae-a-canad: Legolas
She stood for several breaths, unable to answer either of us. I have seen this before. I have even felt it, in the presence of a woman I thought beautiful. One I thought myself unworthy of.

Lorien
...because the Blue Elf is the one you really love.

enephae-ar-leben: Legolas
"I took Liz's hand and we circled onto the floor. We flew like hawks on the wind, like butterflies in still air. It was like the dance in the nightwood, when she was learning the use of the knives, only this dance was full of joy, of life, of sun and rain and wind and warm earth. Her lithe form glittered with the color of sunlight through spring leaves. Her hair was the color of deer, of treeskin, of sparrow's wings." Legolas fell silent, gazing off into the dark distance where the light of Valinor shown far away, at the end of the Straight Road.
Gimli said nothing. He understood.

Lorien
Kurt took my hand in his and as if for the first time I noticed his hands were no bigger than Legolas' or any other man. Just two extra-large fingers instead of four. Chiseled, strong, perfect for an acrobat. Gentle enough to caress a lady's...
Gaaaahhh! What am I thinking!
If he saw the blush, he didn't show it. He swirled me into the dance, as graceful in the two dimensions of the flat dance floor as he was in the three dimensions of the trapeze or the Danger Room. The sweeping sleeves of the pirate shirt hid the clean-chiseled muscles of his arms, but I could feel them. A triangle of well-muscled blue velvet showed through the deeply open neck of the pirate shirt. And I could feel his shoulders under my hands, muscled without unnecessary bulk. The breeches did nothing to hide his tiny little hips, and um...
...nevermind. Spandex. A privilege, not a right. And he definitely had the privilege.
Oh... mein... Gott...
I focused on his tail, which had not been stepped on once so far this evening, despite the fair crowd in the barn. It swept through the other dancers, making graceful curves and exclamation points, accenting every move of his own dance.
Our dance.
Damn he was good. A lot of people noticed. He was kind of hard to not notice; a blue fuzzy guy with a tail in pirate boots and an elf hat. Even though he stood out no more among the odd E.L.F. crowd than he did among the X-Men, I think the eyes of every woman in the place were noticing him. The ones who weren't noticing Legolas at the time. We whirled by them, Legolas and Liz, and the two Elves exchanged knowing smiles.
Mein Gott he was cute when he smiled.
The sleeve of the pirate shirt slipped and I could feel the velvet texture of his arm. Warm and hard and soft all at once. I wondered what the rest of him felt like and if all of it was fuzzy...
I did not just think that!
We talked, and his accent tickled all the way down to my toes. Yeah, that's something you could listen to all night long, curled up next to him completely stark...
A hand touched my cheek. He smiled down at me, "You're blushing."
I am such a geek. No, wait, I am a hottie, I am a hottie, I am a hottie. I made myself look at Kurt's face instead of the floor. He was still smiling, totally unaware that I had just pictured him stark nekkid. And the smile on his face wasn't a you're a geek smile, it was sympathetic, ." I felt my face grow hotter. Yeah, I am a hottie. I was so glad he wasn't a telepath.
"Ach, times like this I wish I had Jeanie's talents."
Jean Grey, X-Men telepath. "No you don't!"
He chuckled, we spun around the far side of the floor. The music changed its beat and he downshifted flawlessly into a slow dance. Some guys at school made slowdancing look like a porno movie. Hot as he was, Kurt was the perfect gentleman. He made it look like Swan Lake, and feel like...
Oh.
Mein.
Gott.

enephae-ar-leneg: Legolas
At last Legolas spoke again. Softly, hesitantly, like a deer stepping out into a moonlight clearing. Gimli stood like a rock, afraid to break the spell.
"The eyes of Elizabeth held the swift light of mortal things. And suddenly I understood the choice of Luthien. Why she would love a mortal of the Edain. We danced to the edge of the crowd, and into the shadows under the starlit garlands of green. I drew her close, framed her bright face with my hands and kissed her."

Lorien
I know I looked just like a big bass, standing there with my mouth open. The last notes of the slow dance song faded, and musicians exchanged places on stage. I wouldn't have noticed that except for the big fat silence it caused.
Kurt swung around and followed my gaze. "Achja." he sighed. When his eyes met mine again his face had a gentle sympathetic look, like an older brother whose sister's just been dumped at the dance. Somewhere on the other end of the barn a new band started up another song. Kurt held out a hand. "Do you want to talk? Or dance."
I stared at the floor, then at his hand, then at the floor again. You know, the kissing thing wasn't bothering me as much as it should have. A month ago I would have gone over there with a big battleaxe or something, except I had no idea how to wield one.
Nope. It was fine. Just fine. I just wanted one of my own. A kiss I mean, not a battleaxe.
Preferably in blue velvet. I caught Kurt's hand and pulled him out on the floor. From the stage came the familiar sounds of one of my Dad's favorite songs from back in the Pleistocene; Safety Dance, from Men Without Hats.
"Ahhh we can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well they're no friends of mine..."
I looked up and Bran was on stage singing, in perfect imitation of the original record.
Kurt's face registered startlement, then laughter. And I realized what Bran was really singing:
Ahhh, we can bamf if we want to, we can leave your friends behind,
Cause your friends don't bamf and if they don't bamf
Well they're no friends of mine
I say, we can go where we want to, a place they will never find
and we can act like we come from out of this world
leave the real one far behind
we can bamf, we can bamf
everything's under control
we can bamf, we can bamf
doin' it through the walls
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody stand on your hands
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody's takin' the chance
is it safe to bamf?
yeah it's safe to bamf!
where's it safe to bamf?
you can see to bamf!
So it's safe to bamf!
Everybody bamf!
We can bamf where we want to, the night is young and so am I
and we can flip real neat from our hands to our feet
and surprise 'em when we learn to fly.
we can be acrobats if we want to, and we can learn to be
in sporadic nomadic erratic kinetic
gravitational liberty
we can bamf, we can bamf
everything's under control
we can bamf, we can bamf
doin' it through the walls
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody stand on your hands
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody's takin' the chance
is it safe to bamf?
yeah it's safe to bamf!
where's it safe to bamf?
you can see to bamf!
So it's safe to bamf!
Everybody bamf!
we can bamf if we want to, we got all your life and mine
as long as we use it never gonna lose it
everything'll work out fine
we can bamf, we can bamf
everything's under control
we can bamf, we can bamf
doin' it through the walls
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody stand on your hands
we can bamf, we can bamf
everybody's takin' the chance
is it safe to bamf?
yeah it's safe to bamf!
where's it safe to bamf?
you can see to bamf!
So it's safe to bamf!
Everybody bamf!
And we bamfed. Into the rafters, onto the stage, onto the outside roof, back to the dance floor. I reeled, laughing hysterically, tripped over my spikey heels and fell.
He caught me as if it was take forty-two of a well-planned Hollywood stunt. I stared up into his face, nothing but sunlit eyes glowing out of the shadows. Warm breath, warm arms, hard muscle around me, holding me. My laugh faded.
Visions of Harlequin Romance covers came to mind. I gave them a mental kick into the hearth by the great Tannenbaum. He had way more class than that. I stared up into his face, wishing it was a little closer.
He stood me on my feet, and backed up a step.
Three of the kids came by, one doing wheelies with the kid in the wheelchair. Mini-Xavier reached out and grabbed Nighty's tail, he spun and caught her up in his arms and bamfed, to hysterical giggles from the others.
Verdammte mist.
I slumped into a chair by the buffet, eying up the double-death chocolate brownies. No, not even a whole dozen of them was enough comfort food right now.

enephae-ar-odog: Legolas
Legolas perched on the ship's rail, swaying with the rise and fall of the sea, quiet now under the stars.
Gimli drained his tankard, leaning comfortably against the bottom of the same rail. "A lass with a broken heart. Now what would a true gentleman do in such a case?"
"Ai...I saw it. I felt it, and it was grevious to behold."

Lorien
I looked up to see Mountain Woman Lizard handing me a brownie. Double death chocolate. The kind with the peanut butter icing of doom.
"No, thanks." I said glumly.
"What?" she followed my eyes to where Kurt was tossing one of the smaller kids, spinning and giggling like a tiny aerialist. Legolas stood not far from him, watching. "Oh. Uh." She looked down at the floor. I've never seen her quite that shade of embarrassment before.
"It's ok." I blorted. "You two...I mean...well...you're so much alike and all..."
"We do have to send them back." She said. "It's not like it'll go anywhere or anything."
"Yeah."
She watched Legolas as he picked up one of the taller kids and flipped him to Kurt. "Really sucks big fat river rocks if only one of us gets to kiss'em."

enephae-a-tolodh: Legolas
"Kurt, mellon nin."
He set the last child down, and turned towards me.
"You have been a great swordbrother these last few days, and your gifts make you stand tall among the Eldar, but you are as dense as any of the Edain."
"Was?"
I nodded toward the two young women standing by the buffet.
"Did I miss something?"
"A young lady who cares deeply for you, even though she knows she must let you return to your own world."
"Achja." he said softly. "Which is why I spent most of the evening dancing with her. That, and the fact that she is a great dancer. And a charming, intelligent girl."
"She wishes more than a dance."
"She is seventeen!" On his face was an expression of shock and dismay.
"And your point is?" I said.
"Seventeen." his hand made a hard line in the air as if dividing a continent. "Adult."
"Edain. You place so much weight on the counting of years."
"Ja! It's kind of important..." he turned as Tas swept up behind him, caught his arm and came to stand between us.
"Boys," she said, shaking her head. She placed a hand in the center of each of our chests. "I have known many 'Edain'... humans." She tapped Kurt's chest. Then mine, and it was like the love-tap of a Dwarf's battleaxe. "I fell in love with a man of the Lakota... " she turned to Kurtvagner, "...long ago in your reckoning. In that tribe, and many others around the world, girls were married before they reached two decades. Legolas is from a similar place. Time has no meaning there. Girls like Liz and Lorien would be adults, married, with kids even. Even among the Eldar such girls might be already married. I'm sure you understand this, for the Roma who raised you have similar customs."
"That was another time, another place." Kurt straightened, eye to eye with me, and the sunglow of his eyes was hard to look into.
"You are dense." Tas said to him. She reached out and cupped his cheek in her hand, turning his head toward her. She studied his eyes for a long moment, then smiled, "Legolas is no less a gentleman than you, mein freund. It was only a kiss. But a real one. And that's what Lorien wants too."
Sadness touched the face of the Luinda, "Ahhh, she is still only a girl, I can't..."

Lorien
"Hey, the party's not over yet. The band's gonna go all night, the way it looks. Or maybe you guys need to hibernate after that little scuffle yesterday."
I looked up to find Zan grinning at me, one sleeve of a pirate shirt much like Kurt's rolled up, and a hand juggling three brownies at once. His bright red hair fell around the edges of his face making him look a bit like an Anime hero's sidekick. Behind him Dana drifted by, signing to the tall guy she'd been dancing with before, the blond merrow in the wheelchair was flipping something from the buffet table to Shenzi. Legolas and Kurt had vanished somewhere.
"Bring on the daleks and zombies." Liz said, tossing something to Kodi. "We're just getting warmed up."
"Mmmm hm." Zan said through a couple of brownies. His sea-grey eyes studied mine, and suddenly he was more Elrond than cute sidekick. He started humming something, it sounded familiar, like I'd heard it in a Disney movie. Yeah, The Little Mermaid.
Go on and kiss the girl.
"Gawd, are you all psychic?" I blorted. I could feel my face going red as a cooked lobster.
"Psychotic maybe." Liz said. She leaned forward, and her face looked like Tas', contemplating squirrels.
Zan backed up a step and stuffed another brownie in his mouth. "Yrff phrblmmf if one ff clfffrr."
"What?" Liz grabbed the last brownie out of his hand and sat it back on the table.
He swallowed with Liz glaring at him, one hand between him and the next brownie. "Your problem, " he said, more clearly this time, "is one of culture. Elves pay no attention to age, and apparently pointy-eared blue fuzzy German mutant Roman Catholic acrobats with tails do...even when they're raised in a circus by Gypsies. You're seventeen, he isn't, 'nuff said."
Oh God. I buried my face in my hands. Did they all know?
"Ow, Mr. Sensitivity." Liz said, "Maybe you could get a job as a tabloid psychic. Or your own infomercial. Yeah, replace Miss Cleo."
He grinned at me, wide and wicked. "Nah. I got a better idea."

The lower half of the great bank barn had been changed from stables to a spacious apartment. Local stone lined the walls and the floor. The original huge hand-hewn beams soared across the ceiling. There was a bathroom with a hottub bigger than some backyard pools. I stood, staring in the mirror and couldn't believe what I saw.
"Many things I can command the mirror to reveal, and to some I can show what they desire to see. but the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold." It was Zan who had spoken, and the words were those of the White Lady of Lorien to Frodo at the Mirror of Galadriel.
The woman staring back at me had my brown, frizzy hair, but now it was streaked with sunlight, and fell in something like a longer version of Kurt's indigo curls. She was older, twenty-five, maybe. And leaner, though nowhere near the anorexia of the latest cover model brainfart. She was more voluptuous than Tas' hard-muscled form, or Liz's whippet-thin grace.
But damn she looked fine!
"That is not me." I said, and the illusion wavered.
Zan raised a hand and gestured, as if he was adjusting a TV. The image wavered back into focus. "It is you. The one you'll become. If you stay on this path. If you believe."
"How do you know?" The illusion wobbled again.
"Hey, cut that out, you're screwin' with my style here." he made another adjustment. "I just know, OK? It's an Elf thing."
"I am a hottie." Liz said.
I stared back into the mirror. Squinted at the strange woman squinting back at me. "You think it'll work?"
"I am a hottie I am a hottie I am a hottie I am a hottie." Liz repeated the Mantra of Tas.
"Do I turn into a pumpkin at midnight or what?"
"No." Zan gave me a huge pirate grin. The kind you usually see right before all hell breaks loose.
Liz poked at me. "Feels real enough."
"It is real. Not like that image inducer thingie Nightcrawler has. More like the Holodeck on the Enterprise. Energy and matter...oh, nevermind. It's real OK?"
"What if he thinks it's really stupid..."
Zan caught my shoulders and shoved me out the door toward the stairs.
"Remember the Mantra." Liz said.

enephae-a-neder: Legolas
I turned to see our ladies walk through the far door, into the starlit glow of the great hall. Liz moving with the grace of a swift greyhound, one hand pressing her reluctant friend forward.
"Elo!"
"Was?"
I believe our expressions matched, for Kurtvagner could see better in the dim light than I, though I could see farther. We both saw the great change that had come over Lorien the Fair.
"For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy." Kurt whispered the words of Galadriel from the great tale.
"It is no deceit, mellon nin, but a reflection of what will be." I told him.
"Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?" Zan said from behind his shoulder.

Lorien
I stood in the starry shadows under the garlands by the door. A million light years away the hearth glowed on the next set of musicians, and a lone flute wailed like a lost nightbird. Something with strings joined it, danced around it. Not Celtic, not New-Age, something wholly original. Elvish. I turned to say something to Liz, but she was gone. So was Zan. And I couldn't see Legolas anywhere.
No, wait, he was up by the stage, with Bran and the rest of the Elves, coiled around an odd instrument with strings. Liz sat by him, close and cozy. The YouTube crew was piled around the edges of the low stage on beanbags, some of the smaller ones already snoozing. Three of them were piled on the tall guy with the orca eyespot hair. One of them was wearing Kurt's elf hat. Jon perched on a tall stool, flute in his hands, Tas held a boran with a running horse painted on the drum head. The merrow in the wheelchair was singing in a voice no human could match. Half a dozen Elves I didn't recognize by name were weaving their own melodies into the nightbird wail of Jons flute, and the sea-song of the blond with the swordfish tail.
"Lorien?" The voice was soft and accented and tinged with more than a little surprise.
I turned and the shadows behind me were empty of anything but the twinkling lights of the garland. Then the shadows moved, and two of the lights resolved into eyes. "Ack!"
"Sorry my lady, I forget sometimes how well I vanish." Kurt stepped out into the light and held out a hand. He stared at my face, then his eyes left tracks up and down my night-blue dress. His mouth was still open in surprise.
"Ah." I said. "Erk." And nothing more intelligent would emerge. "Elf magic." I said at last.
"Unglaublich! Incredible." He said it in about five more languages, including Sindarin.
I went as red as Zan's hair. "It's ummm...well...it's how I'll look...I mean..how I'll be...eventually." Ohmygawd I amsuchadork.
The look of surprise melted into a gentle smile. "It is how your spirit will shine through one day. Like the beauty of a coral reef shining through clear water."
The lone flute cried like gulls in the dark, the strings sounded like rain on a summer night.
He nodded toward the stage, "Did you not say you wished to see Elf-magic?"
I smiled through the tightness in my throat. "Galadriel."
"It's Elvish music." He said. "I think they have something special planned."
"Yeah. Wow. Elvish music and Christmas Eve. Better than Santa, huh?"
"Yes."
A few people moved onto the floor in a slow, stately dance, but most sat and watched. A mist crept up from the floor, and wafted to the walls.
The walls vanished.
The mist fell back, and became snow. Rolling leagues of snow, but without the bone-deep cold. Against a midnight sky impossibly full of stars, great mountains rose, flanks sprinkled with fir forest. In the other direction, a great bay opened up. Far out in its waters something surfaced, blew a great gout of mist against the dark sky. Somewhere a wolf howled, then another. Shenzi and Kodi answered from their places by the musicians. The great hearth was now a bonfire, the Tannenbaum sparkling like night sky beside it. The wolfsong wove itself into the nightbird melody, arctic wind moaned beneath it like a great woodwind instrument. The not-so-distant sea thundered under it. A great white bear paused in its wanderings on the edge of the ice pack and stood, entranced.
On the edge of the world, the sky flickered into life. Into a thousand colors. Curtains of light danced across the horizon. Faint lightnings flickered and shifted in the invisible wind from the sun. The light spread out searching fingers, blazed like flame, and danced over our heads. Light blazing through the long dark night of winter.
Kurt was still holding out one beautiful, strong hand. I took it and we danced under the shifting aurora, gliding across the glittering snow as light as Elves.
It was not like the other dances. This was Elvish music. Time ceased to have any meaning. It was a moment, a heartbeat, a single breath. It was the whole Fourth Age. It was Beren and Luthien in the woods of Doriath. It was her father Thingol meeting Melian the Maia and standing entranced by her eyes while acorns grew into trees around them and fell back into the soil. He held me close and I could feel the lean, hard lines of his chest and arms. The compact power of his hips against mine. The gentle caress of his tail, the velvet texture of his skin. The warmth of his breath, the beat of his great heart.
The string music swept away like wind, and only the flute remained, singing like a nightingale, like Tinuviel. A flight of something small and winged and bright in the dark swept by, lifting my hair with their breeze. The flute whispered now, like a faraway dream. I looked up into eyes that held the light of the sun, even in the dark.
And he kissed me. A real one.

Do Not Open Till Yule: Fourth Age
odophae: Legolas
Legolas stretched, and poured Gimli another mug, "The Gifting was not the solemn affair of Galadriel's land, it was more like the descriptions I have heard of Bilbo's great eleventy-first birthday. I cannot begin to describe the wonderful things that appeared when the bright-colored paper had been ripped from the boxes! Children shrieked with joy, older folk laughed as if they were children again. Liz and Lorien, and even Dana were like my brothers at their earliest Yules. I had found things for them at the Mall, but they seemed to like the things I had made the best. They gave me many fine things that I could carry back with me to Mirkwood, things that would not seem out of place there."
Gimli saw Legolas' eyes go misty grey, like soft rain, he cleared his throat, cocked a questioning eyebrow.
"The gifts are long gone, gone the way of mortal things." His eyes brightened, "But there was a box, a carved chest, with twining vines, running horses..."
"Dogs that look like wolves?"
"Yes."
"The one in your cabin!" Gimli said. "And those great strange beasts carved on the sides must be your indriks."
"Yes."
"Well, it has not gone the way of mortal things!"
"No. Spells were woven about it, to hold it till this time, till this particular Yule. The first one we will see in Eressea."
A broad smile found its way through Gimli's beard. He leaned forward.
The Elf's eyes narrowed sternly, "You'll have to wait."
"Hmmmph."
"One other thing was given to me, and to Kurtvagner. The blond man in the chair with wheels..."
"The strange one with the fish's tail?"
"One of the sea-folk, Morgan was his name. And the tall one, with white streaks in his dark hair. Another of the sea-folk. Like Kurtvagner, or Aragorn, he had many names..."
"One will do, I think."
"Shaughnessy, then. His favorite at the time. They came to us, the sea-folk, and gave us each long narrow boxes. Kurt's contained his lost cutlasses. Mine contained my knives, the ones Dana had gifted me with.
Shaughnessy smiled and spoke to me with his hands, like this," and Legolas' long strong hands wove patterns in the air, like a dance, like the play of dolphins in the bow wave of the ship, " he told me, 'I found these for you, you may yet have need of them.'"
"You never did describe these knives well." Gimli said, "They must have been fine work for the fish-man and the other...what was he?"
"Whale. The graceful black and white ones, the largest of the dolphins we have seen. The ones whose females have mooncurved fins, and the males great fins like swords."
" Well, they must have been fine knives for them to have dived to the bottom of that dark smelly place."
"They are the ones you saw me wield earlier."
"The ones you have carried all this time?"
Legolas nodded.
"But they were made by Men, for that...what did you call it...?"
"Movie, yes. But they were not made by Men."
"Not made by..."
"Some of my folk had found an island in that world nearly as fair as the one we are headed for."
"Island?"
"On the far side of the world. A land that held flightless, furry birds, mountains as great as Caradhras, great kauri trees like mallorns, and a living dinosaur with three eyes."
Gimli gave him a disbelieving look, "Three eyes?"
"And it had once held eagles as great as Gwaihir!"
Gimli's face held blatant disbelief.
"Well, nearly as great."
"Furry birds. With no wings."
Legolas nodded, smiling. "Kiwis. And they smell very bad. And there is an excellent fruit with the same name, it's furry too. It is a beautiful place, all the wonders of Middle-earth packed into a bit of land in the midst of the Great Sea. A bit of land not much bigger than the Shire. It was there that they filmed our tale."
"Our tale? The tale of the Ring?"
"Yes."
"Ah, it's a sad thing you could not bring this...movie thing...back with you."
Legolas' smile grew, "Ah yes, for many of our folk were in it."
Gimli leaned forward, studying the fair Elvish face he had come to know so well. "There is more you are not telling me."
Legolas practically beamed. "Indeed."

Thunderbird Island
Lorien
to the sea, to the sea, the white gulls are crying
na aear, na aear, myl lain nallol
the wind is blowing, the white foam is flying
i sul ribiel, a i falf los reviol
The Sun stood poised on the equinox, day and night in perfect balance. The Great River had broken winter's hold, ice and trees uprooted washing down over the rocks, and the dams, to the Bay beyond, and to the Sea. Birds flew up the highway of the River, stopping at the many tree cloaked islands, sheltering in the quiet shallows behind them, finding food for their spring journeys. Song of finch and sparrow and warbler filled the air. The gulls wheeled and wailed south, and went to hang out on the sandy beaches of the Atlantic Ocean.
west, west away, the round sun is falling
na annun hae, ias annor dannol
grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling
cair vith, cair vith, lastal hain canel
The tree-lined lane of the Conestoga flowed still as dark glass toward the river. A mist of spring's first green leaves filled the space between the silver grey tree boles. The air and the sky were silver, the water like melted ice, the air warm around the edges, with the promise of new life, and another summer.
the voices of my people, who have gone on before me
lammath in-gwaithen, i gwennin no nin
I will leave, I will leave, the forests that bore me
gwannathon, gwannathon, taur i onnant nin
Dark water drifted under the hulls of seven boats; long, narrow sea-worthy kayaks in a Crayola box of colors, and one canoe, heavily loaded. Most of the 'yaks held one paddler, with a double bladed paddle, but two kayaks were of the type Bran cheerfully called divorce boats; with space for two paddlers. Paddlers who needed a great deal of harmony and patience to stay in rhythm and keep the boat on course.
I was in one of the divorce boats, a big, broad beamed yellow sit-on-top-of kayak, and my PFD and drybag were yellow too. Like Tom Bombadil's boots. No, more like yum-yum yellow, the color sharks find very attractive.
'So we can find you when you fall out of the boat'. Legolas had said.
Bloody Elves.
I was so going to miss them.
He was ahead of me, keeping perfect rhythm with Liz in a long kayak like a white knife blade. Bran, Tas, Jon, and Zan moved their own bright boats down the glassy water, with efficient birdwing strokes of their paddles. Ian piloted the battered canoe, paddling it from the stern with a long kayak paddle. Doc waved at us from the shore, then went back to his fire. Apparently he was no happier on the water than Gimli had ever been.
In the seat behind me was Nightcrawler, red PFD, blue velvet skin against the yellow boat made a bright crayon splash of color in this silver somber day.
"Tail up, lielbling! Your stroke is improving!"
It wasn't really, I still looked like a drunken pirate centipede.
We drifted like a dream under the trees, down the glassy still water. The sky opened up ahead of us, and great towers loomed; the supports for a railroad bridge. The bridge itself leapt like a spiderwork version of the Bridge of Kazad-dum far over our heads. I looked up and a lone spraggle of green raised its head above the spiderwork; a tree growing out of the track. We floated by the concrete feet of the bridge, and Bran turned his boat broadside to us. He pointed downstream, "Follow me, watch the currents. The river's up, so a lot of the rocks are buried under four feet of water. But the current's going to be a little squirrely now." He turned and looked at me, "Ready?"
No not at all. Not for the river. And not for what lay beyond.
for our days are ending, our years failing
an midui orath vin, a dennin inath vin
I will pass the wide waters' lonely sailing
trevidithon aear land erui ciriel
The white knife of Legolas' boat slid out into the current and cut downstream. Above us, to the north, and not very far, rose the wall of the Safe Harbor Dam 'If the siren sounds, you have a few minutes at most to get off the water, or behind one of the islands,' Bran had told us. 'Then the water comes through.' It would not be the great tsunami I had pictured, but it would be fast, and dangerous if you were in the middle of the river. I wriggled in my borrowed wetsuit, at least I wouldn't die of hypothermia before somebody hauled me out of the cold water. Probably somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay far to the south.
The bow of our boat turned south, toward the bay, and the sea beyond. The swift current caught it and pulled us into the river. I felt the boat swing as Kurt stroked hard aport. "Port, liebes, pull hard, we must straighten the boat." I leaned into it, the broad boat wobbled, and my hips did a hula dance to stay with it, I weebled, and caught a crab; the paddle skewing hard and dragging me down. "Easy Lorien, it's not about strength, it's about finesse," came the softly accented voice behind me, as Kurt steadied the boat with an acrobat's skill. I turned the paddle, brought it back to horizontal in the air before me and took a breath.
"Couldn't we just have taken the helicopter?"
"No."
I knew that of course. Small as the rock was, Bran could have landed on it anyway, but it would have damaged the ancient petroglyphs. And the Gate itself would damage the helicopter. The only way there was low-tech.
Boats, why did it have to be boats. We could have used the teleporters, after all, we had two of them, but noooooo. We didn't use them. And nobody would give me a good reason why.
long are the waves on the last shore falling
falvath enain bo mathedfalas dannol
Squirrely was an understatement. The currents swirled, washed back on themselves, whirled and roared up from unseen obstacles below us. The 'yak knifed forward, then twisted, bow skewing port while the stern yawed starboard. I struggled to stay in rhythm with Kurt, splashing on one side, then the other. Digging in, catching another crab. The boat tilted, water splashed up over the sprayskirt, my neoprene-gloved hands were soaking.
"Isn't this great!" Kurt said from behind me.
Oh yeah, just wonderful.
"I wish we could paddle more of the river today. I'll have to check out this place when I get home. See if it's the same in my world. Look over there!"
Something leggy in varied shades of Elvish greys lifted from a snag near one of the islands we were headed for. "Great Blue Heron." I said.
Kurt smiled, "Look there!" He stuck one blade of his paddle in the water, holding the boat on its course, "I believe that's a cormorant!"
A dark shape skittered along the water's surface, flopping its wings in great effort until it got airborne. "Yeah. Yeah! It is!"
He grinned like a kid, lifted his paddle and stroked the boat forward. I turned, dipped my own paddle. Gradually the rocking of the 'yak made sense, like Pumpkin's rolling back at a walk, or her bumpity bumpity trot. Gradually the paddle stopped twisting in my hands, and the water stopped trying to grab it and pull me in. I could see the birdwing flash of Kurt's paddle just at the edge of my sight, and I could hear the faint splash of it. Gradually I matched it, and it was like the dance with Kurt. Like snowboarding with Legolas, sailing down the mountain like birds on the wind.
sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling
lammath vilui vi Tol Gwannen cannen
At last we came into the lee of several large tree-cloaked islands. We drifted by the shore of one while Bran stood in his cockpit and stared downstream.
"Well?" Tas said.
An expression of uncertainty crossed Bran's face.
"Bird Boy's lost the rock." Tas said.
"It was right..." he pointed uncertainly down the river.
We all knew approximately where it was. Somewhere not far below the dam in the middle of the river. There were maps, of course, and archaeological tomes and websites devoted to the rock, and others like it. Our Fellowship of the 'Yak had a rough map, and a vague idea that there were birds carved on the rock. Certainly the Elves had a much clearer idea of where it lay. Certainly our Gatesingers had been there before.
Bran seemed quite uncertain of precisely where it lay. Nor did he offer to take to the air to find it faster. Just as well, I did not want faster. There were a lot of rocks in this part of the river. And the visibility was none too great; even an Elf... or raven... could see little farther than a human in the mist that turned the very air to mithril.
Legolas had drifted out farther into the stream, now he too stood, feet firm in the bottom of his cockpit, the narrow boat not even tilting in the current beginning to sweep him downstream. "There. It's there. I see something like a bird carved into the stone."
I could see a vague dark hump in the silver haze where water met sky.
Bran folded himself back into his cockpit, snapped his sprayskirt back around the coaming, and paddled out into the middle of the river. We drifted out of the lee of the island back into the current, pointing our noses downstream, following Legolas and Liz's white boat. The tree-covered islands sailed by, and rocks with no more than a bush or two clinging to them. A skein of geese flew over, bound for nesting grounds farther north. Something bigger and broadwinged sailed out at the edge of mortal sight.
It rose out of the middle of the river, one lone grey rock. We drew up to its northern end, where one sprawly bush clung to the bow of the rock. Bran eased his boat up against the rock, broadside, unsnapped his sprayskirt and reached under his knees. His hand reappeared with something that looked exactly like a large scrub brush. He leaned over and began scrubbing at the rock near the water's edge.
"What is he doing?" It didn't look like anything that had anything to do with the Gatesong spell. In fact, there was something incredibly incongruous about an Elf with a scrub brush.
"Algae." Kurt said.
"What?"
"Water, rocks, silt. Algae. It would be a shame to have you paddle so far so well, and have you slip on a patch of river slime, fall in and float down to the Bay."
Well, maybe I'd get lucky like Aragorn in that Two Towers scene, and float down the river dreaming about my True Love.
Bran cleared a path through the winter's worth of silt and slime, leapt lightly up on the rock and lifted his boat to a safe place.
The white boat slid up to the rock, Legolas steadied it with his paddle braced against rock and boat. Liz leapt out with the lightness of an Elf, she climbed soundlessly up the rock in her wetsuit boots and stared down at her feet, "Leggy, is this the bird you saw?"
He came over and stared down, I came up behind them." Uh oh."
Legolas gave me a sharp, surprised look, "Uh oh?"
The bird in question sprawled across several feet of the grey rock, carefully incised nearly an inch deep...
...with a steel chisel, sometime in the sixties. It was a huge dove, with some kind of random flower in its beak, and a few carved graffiti signatures around it.
"Uh oh?" Legolas repeated, "Yes, this is what I saw from back there." He waved upriver.
"Somehow I don't think that's thousands of years old." Liz said. She glanced up at Bran, he shrugged and said nothing.
"Ai, I am sorry." Legolas said.
I'm cold. I thought. And hungry. And there was a lot of river to search, to find the real rock. The other boats floated at the bow of the rock, everyone in them looking up at us expectantly. Bran retreated to the downstream end and began humming a soft song, something that sounded like the grey silver day. He stared downriver, but if he saw any rock more likely than the one we were standing on he didn't say.
Well, we had to find the real rock, and it had to be today, because after today, the Gate would not open again for a long time. I squinted down the river into the silver distance, wishing for elf-sight.
With some tiny little part of me still wishing we wouldn't find the real gaterock.
No, we couldn't keep them, not for another year. Not for another minute. If we had to look at every rock in the river today, we would. We would find the gaterock, and we would send our heroes home. Anyway, we had two Elves, standing on the highest point of land for some distance. "Legolas, Bran, see anything?" I asked. Both were now peering downriver. Both shook their heads.
"Well," I said, "I guess we should get back in the boats and keep looking."
Out in the silver sky over the river, at the edge of mortal sight, something appeared. A streak of dark color growing larger. It sailed up the river against the wind, and now I could see its strongly beating wings. Broad wings. White head. Broad white tail.
"The eagles are coming." Liz said, just like in The Book.
I looked and they were coming, two adult bald eagles, beating up the river. They soared over us and wheeled off into the silver air.
"Look down." Liz said.
I did and blinked.
A faint shape sprawled across the rock at my feet. A scratch, a scar left by river ice.
A scar with wings. I knelt and looked at it closer, ran a light finger over it. "That's a thunderbird." I said.
Legolas knelt and ran a light hand across it, then stood abruptly. "Here's another!"
"And another!" Liz nearly shouted.
Bran turned from his place at the stern end of the rock and flashed us a pirate smile. He didn't stop humming.
The others came onto the rock now, lifting their kayaks out of the water, to perch them on the bow of the rock, far from the petroglyphs, for there was no safe place to anchor them in the current, except for the small bush, where the laden canoe remained tied.
The rock was full of the 'glyphs, when you knew where to look. They were old, and worn by time. A flashlight beaming straight across them, or the rising sun, would throw them into stark, shadowed relief, but on this day of hazy, diffused light, they had remained almost invisible. A damp sponge wiped across them darkened the rock, leaving the pale petroglyph gleaming. There were thunderbirds; stylized eagles with outstretched wings and long legs, like Men. There were strange people with long ears, or horns.
"Wolverine, in his old X-costume." Liz said, grinning.
Kurt laughed. "And there's an X. Like our logo."
"The thunderbirds could be phoenixes, too," Liz said.
There were others, some so faint they almost weren't there. And far to the river left side of the rock, a crouching character, with pointed ears and a long tail.
I wiped it with the sponge to make it clearer.
"Hey Nighty, look." Liz said, "It's you."
He knelt and peered at it, and grinned back, "But where is Legolas?"
"Here, he's the one with the bow." Liz said pointing.
Bran knelt beside us, running his fingers lightly over the 'glyphs, as if he could feel far more than any of us mere mortals could see with our eyes.
"Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the havens long ago."
Bran looked up at me.
"Legolas; The Ring Goes South. You knew this was the right rock all along." I said.
"The Peace Dove marks it as Big Indian Rock. Those with elf-eyes can see that far downriver," he said. "But you needed to find it out for yourself."
Tas came to the shallow hole in the center of the rock, and drew from a small drybag a bundle of sage. She lit it; "For the folk who carved these long ago." and began another song.

odophae-a-min: Legolas
"But Legolas, there were three months between the Yule feast and the journey across the river to the Gate Rock. There were only two months between the time of your arrival in Lizard's woods, and the time of Yule, and much happened in those two months! Surely you did not dance and feast and stare at the stars for three months, or lie on the beach and drink rum."
The dark haired Elf smiled, "No. There were still many things do do in their Middle-earth, and many wonders to see. Even if I would not remember them until now. There were films, and books and museums. A great building the size of a fortress of Kings; its floors all of water and its walls of glass. It held fish and other things that lived in the seas. There were menageries of strange animals from far lands. And gatherings of musicians," here he winced in memory of the experience, "where they played strange music far too loudly. And we traveled across the land itself. To the far north woods, where I at last encountered a fisher. To the south, and the Great Bay, where we sailed on a real ship, much like the one that brought us here." He paused and his eyes took on that glaze, that look Gimli had come to think of as Elvensight, where he seemed to be seeing something far beyond the vision of Men or Dwarves or any other mortal beings. "Much happened." he said at last. And smiled, and said no more of it.

Lorien
The sun stayed hidden, but the silver grey day brightened to glowing ithildin, like the metal that marked the doors of Moria. We laid out the spell components, and sang the Song; Bran and Jon, the Gatesingers, Legolas who had sung thousands of songs in his long years under the trees of Mirkwood, and me.
Little old mortalchick me. What was it Tolkien had said in Appendix F? Their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard. He was so right. Years of music and voice lessons hadn't prepared me for this. Singing the indricothere song with Legolas was like summer rain. This was a hurricane. That had been blue sky, this was the whole rainbow. That was one horse in a collected canter. This was a whole freakin' galloping herd of wild mustangs.
Ok, ok, I know, shut up Lorien and get on with the tale.
We could not see the sun move across the sky, and Elves, and Liz dislike watches intensely. We stood in a loose circle around the edges of the rock. The ithildin sky shifted to mithril, to silver, to pewter. The river flowed on, time flowed on. The song flowed on. Geese came up the river, rowing the air with swift wingbeats, singing their own haunting melody. A heron flew overhead, let out a hoarse 'groank!' and veered off. Turkey vultures danced on tilted wings.
And absolutely nothing happened.
I began to wonder if the Dragonkin had given us the wrong bloody spell. Or none at all.
The pewter sky began to shift down the greyscale to iron.
A lone young eagle, clad all in brown flew out of the grey darkening sky and circled us. Once, twice, three times.
A bubble of air in the middle of our circle shimmered and tuned itself into somewhere else.
The Song fell silent. I could hear the running river, the distant cry of gulls and geese.
The bubble of Elsewhere in front of us contained grass, trees, a fat book dropped casually as if someone had just been reading it moments ago, and a path. At the end of it was a familiar sight.
"That's the X-Mansion." Liz whispered.
"Ja." The Incredible Nightcrawler said softly. He smiled, "There's my book, just where I left it!"
"What book?" I said.
He grinned, "The one with the Alan Lee Illustrations."
Ian held out the big red drybag which contained our Yule presents to Kurt. He hefted it with ease, looking uncannily like one of Santa's helpers. He embraced each of us in turn, then stood before me. "What's the mantra?"
"I am a hottie." I almost got the words out straight past the big fat lump in my throat.
"Right, liebling." he bent and gave me one more real kiss, then turned and vanished down the road to Xavier's.
"Next verse." Bran said.
The bubble stayed, shimmering in the center of the rock. Legolas came forth and peeled off his light wetsuit, under it was something he could wear between our bubble and his bath in Mirkwood. Something that wouldn't look out of place in Middle-earth.
We sang and I could feel the power thundering through the ancient stone from the bones of the earth, from the flowing river, from the distant sea. Xavier's blurred, shifted, melted. The greens of the woods behind the mansion wavered, and became woods.
The Song stopped.
For a moment I thought we'd screwed it up somehow. The woods were still there. But the book and the path were gone. And the trees were darker, more tangled. Old. Older than anything in Penn's woods. Older than anything I'd ever seen. Trees you could drive a truck through, if a Dwarf made a hole through the center of one. Draped with vine and cloaked with moss. They marched into the green distance, into dark olive shadow. A dapple of orange sun found its way to the forest floor, a floor deep in drifted leaves, tangled with fallen branches. Something scrambled in the low branches, letting loose a shower of leaves and twigs. I caught a glimpse of something dark leaping lightly to the next tree; one of Mirkwood's famous black squirrels.
I turned at a slight sound, and saw Ian and Tas with the great carved chest that Ian had stowed in the canoe. There was a drybag too, like Kurt's, full of the things we were sending back to Mirkwood with Legolas. Things that would not seem out of place there. Things that would not raise too many questions. Or change the history of Middle-earth.
The rest we had stowed in the chest. A chest that would be opened one day, but not in Middle-earth.
Legolas stood before Jon... Aiwei son of whoever... a silent exchange passed between their eyes, and they embraced like swordbrothers.
Then we stepped into the bubble. All of us save one Gatesinger, Jon. The trees rose overhead rainforest tall. The last lowering sun of the day glinted through the leaves. Green leaves, Eryn Lasgalen, that's what it would be called again one day, far in the future, when the Dark was finally driven back forever.
"Is this the right place?" someone asked. I turned and it was Ian.
Legolas' eyes searched the tangled canopy, traveled across the mossy tree boles. He knelt and scooped something off the ground. A smile broke on his face like rising sun. "We are but a short walk from my father's halls. Look, there is the pool where I bathed. And there are my things."
A pile of clothes, a Mirkwood bow, and quiver, and a few other things lay on the rocks by a pool, a clear stream burbled down over mossy rocks, small plants grew out of cracks and crevices, bright flowers punctuating the dark rock. A little bird darted and dived among the eddies of that stream, a small whiskered face peered out at us and vanished. Among the tangle of greenery something snorted and thundered off. Last summer I would have jumped out of my skin at that, but I had now traveled enough with the woodland prince to know it was only a deer.
Legolas turned suddenly, "Hear that?"
Through the birdsong, splashing water and scrambling of squirrels came distant voices, laughter, someone began a song. Not a misty morning Elvish sort of song, something a bit rowdy.
Legolas' smile broadened, "Gilien. Ah, she said she would come looking for me in the morning!" His eyes widened in mild alarm, he looked up, and I realized the light was growing, not diminishing. The sun was rising, not setting as I'd thought. He listened a moment more.
"We know where we are then," Bran said, "But when are we?"
"I have not been gone long, only since last night. No one has moved my things. And I can tell by Gilien's song, and the shape of the moss and the song of the birds. We should hurry, or Gilien will find us. And be full of questions."
"They'll probably be full of questions anyway when they see this." Ian unrolled the bright yellow drybag's lip and pulled out the green woven bag within.
Tas stood by the big chest. "And you'll have answers."
The distant song drew closer, the sparkling light through the trees grew brighter. Legolas went to each of our Fellowship, embracing them, and dropping something into each hand. He paused in front of me, smiled that bright sweet smile he had given Frodo, when he was blond, and Orlando Bloom. He cupped my hand in his, and when the warmth of his fine-chiseled hand withdrew, there was one perfect acorn. "Green leaves, from Eryn Lasgalen." He framed my face with his hands for a moment and I looked into eyes that were tree-shadow and rain, sky and sea and forest river. He said no words, but I heard them in my heart.
I have looked the last upon that which is fairest. Why did I come on this Quest? Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting.
Nay, nay. For such is the way of it, to find and to lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream...but I count you blessed...and me...and the memory shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale.
He kissed me then, gently, turned and stood facing Liz. And kissed her and held her. It was a moment, for the distant voices were near now, though Liz would tell me later it was all of the whole Fourth Age. He stepped back and Ian came to stand before him. He reached out and the familiar green light danced around his hands, playing over Legolas' face like spring leaflight. Legolas blinked, closed his eyes and collapsed into Ian's arms. Ian lowered him gently to the ground.
I knew he'd wake in a few minutes. He'd have a woven bag with things that he might have brought from his own halls, and the chest, woven about with spells that would hold it until a far Yule in another place. And he'd have memories; two girls of the Edain, lost in his realm, and set on the right course again.
The voices were close now, the sun was up, dancing through the bright green leaves of Mirkwood.
"Come." Tas said.
Liz stood, rooted, eyes like Sam's at the Grey Havens. Like Gimli's, taking his leave of Galadriel.
"Now little sister." Tas melted, shifted and I reached for her mane and swung up. I grabbed Liz's shoulder, shook it. She blinked and swung up behind me. Tas wheeled and melted into the woods, as we heard a happy exclamation, and a burst of Elvish laughter behind us.

in Eressea, which no Man can discover
vi Tol Ereb i Edain u-gennir
where the leaves fall not, land of my people forever
ias lais u-dhannar, dor en-gwaith nin an-uir
I stood on the rock again, the river and sky fading to Elvencloak grey, the river flowing ever on, down to the sea...na aear, na aear. Behind me came the faint rattle of boats being lowered into the water. Lizard stood beside me, staring downriver. The fog had lifted, for I could just make out the distant shapes of shoreline, even though it was more than a little blurry. Somewhere, just out of sight, I heard the cry of gulls in the dusk.
"Go in Peace. I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil."
Gandalf's words at the Grey Havens. I turned to find the one who had spoken them; Bran. The swashbuckling pirate was gone; his face had that gentle smile Legolas had, when he was blond and Orlando Bloom. And when he wasn't. I looked into eyes that were tree-shadow and rain, sky and sea and forest river. He said no more words, but I heard them in my heart.
Welcome to the Fellowship, mellon nin.
They floated just off the bow of Thunderbird Island; pale-haired Jon, with a quiet, welcoming smile; Tas, holding her boat utterly still in the swiftest part of the current; green-eyed Ian, ready to help me with the great bloody yellow divorce boat; flame-haired Zan, grinning broadly, ready for the next adventure. Liz and Bran climbed into their boats with that uncanny grace of Elves and wolves and cats and flowing water drifted out into the current. At last I got into the cockpit of the yellow 'yak, and nobody even had to rescue me out of the cold dark river. I set my paddle and the Elves turned upriver, into the gloaming, away from the sea.
na aear, na aear, myl lain nallol
i sul ribiel, a i falf los reviol
na annun hae, ias annor dannol
cair vith, cair vith, lastal hain canel
lammath in-gwaithen, i gwennin no nin
gwannathon, gwannathon, taur i onnant nin
an midui orath vin, a dennin inath vin
trevidithon aear land erui ciriel
falvath enain bo mathedfalas dannol
lammath vilui vi Tol Gwannen cannen
vi Tol Ereb i Edain u-gennir
ias lais u-dhannar, dor en-gwaith nin an-uir

And in the Darkroom Bind Them
odophae-a tad: Legolas
The great Yule log flamed, sparks drifting into the evening sky, becoming one with Elbereth's stars, just peeking through the warm late light. The gulls wheeled and wailed overhead, dancing out into the darkening sky. The gentle boom of surf falling on white shores sounded like a drumbeat in the dark. Gimli sprawled in the most comfortable chair he had ever known, bare feet wriggling with delight into warm sand...sand that still seemed to be moving with the roll and sway of a ship's deck, or perhaps it was simply due to the mug in his hand, the fourth one he had drained tonight.
"What did you call this?" he asked Legolas.
"Rum." the tall Elf answered, and sprawled back on the sand, counting the emerging stars. Around him other fires blazed, voices murmured, mixed with the surf, the wail of the gulls. Song rose on the air, the distant voice of a flute harmonized with the sound of surf and sandpiper and seagull.
"Ah. Your folk certainly know how to throw a party. I remember my father telling the tale of his journey with Bilbo, all those years ago, through Mirkwood. Ah yes, it was called Mirkwood then, and they got lost."
"Mmmm, a whole lot of Dwarves, blundering about loose in the woods. As competent and skillful as Elves lost in a mine."
"Indeed. He told me how they finally saw your feasting fires gleaming through the trees, like a beacon of hope. Like that...what is it?" He pointed down the beach to a great tower, light beaming out of it in steady, rhythmic flashes.
"Lighthouse."
"...there on the strand. He said it was a magnificent party. I didn't believe him of course. I thought he was just exaggerating. I guess he wasn't."
"Mmmm."
"Legolas."
"Mmm?"
"It's Yule, is it not?"
"Ah." The Elf was silent again, staring dreamily up at the sky over Eressea.
"How much rum have you had?"
"Ahhhhh."
"I seem to remember another bit of my father's adventure in your halls; how Bilbo got the keys."
"Eh?"
"The keys. To let the Dwarves out of your father's dungeons."
"Dungeons?" A look of mock hurt crossed the fair face of the Elf. "They were our finest rooms!"
"And firmly locked."
"Only till Thorin's companions decided to tell why they continued to crash our party... besides, Bilbo let them out before we found out why they were wandering about the woods, harassing the spiders, frightening the deer." he smiled at the memory, then chuckled. "Clever Hobbit."
Gimli chuckled too, deep and resonant, "Yes, he was. A fine and proper 'burglar'!" He went silent and thoughtful as a standing stone, then spoke again, "There was an Elvish butler named Galion, I believe. And some wine. Some very potent wine."
"Dorwinion wine. A particularly heady vintage of those great gardens to the south of our lands." Legolas' eyes went misty with the memory.
"And there was the Chief of the Guards, who was not named, but who very soon had no keys." Gimli's eyes gleamed with humor from under his bushy brows.
"Well, it would not have done to send up inferior wine to the King's table. It had to be tasted."
Gimli grinned at his old friend, "Chief of the Guards. The sort of position a King might give to his youngest son on a time."
Legolas sat up abruptly, "What makes you say that!?"
"Bilbo, at the Council. He recognized you."
"Ahh."
"I wondered about something else. What were you and Merry and Pippin doing with Elrond's piepan in the herb garden?"
"A game they had invented. Or so I thought. Lizard and Lorien called it frisbee."
"Can you show it to me?"
Legolas studied the Dwarf, ensconced in his chair like a King on a throne. "You said you wanted to sit motionless on solid ground for...what was it? Weeks?"
"I'm not that old yet!"
"No, mellon nin, I guess you are not."
"It's Yule." the Dwarf hinted.
Legolas glanced at the fire, "No need for another log yet." He lay back on the warm sand.
"Legolas. I was not thinking of the fire."
"Hmmmm?" The Elf's eyes traveled down the beach to where a number of lovely ladies were laughing around another fire.
"I was not thinking of them either."
"You are getting positively Elvish in your old age. Soon I won't even have to speak out loud."
"I am not. I have just traveled with you enough to know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I am thinking of nothing beyond the virtues of Elvish women."
Legolas raised an eloquent eyebrow.
"Well, one of them did mention she would like to...oh...nevermind."
Legolas smiled, the smile grew.
"Yule." Gimli prompted, clearing his throat.
"What about it?" Legolas said from his place, flattened on the sand.
"The great bloody box!" the Dwarf snapped. "You said it could be opened on Yule!"
"Ahhh." Legolas sat up, shook the sand out of his hair. "Yes, the box." He flowed to his feet, cast a smile at his old friend and vanished into the dark.
"Elves. How they ever got associated with Yule, and presents in that far country, I'll never know." The Dwarf sat back with a sigh. They had been here for a few days, and if Legolas had run on Elvish time in Middle-earth, it was worse now. In the timelessness of this place, he could spend an entire morning on breakfast. A day on song. A whole night staring at the stars.
Elves. He'd probably be back with the box by next Yule.
Elves. A whole country full of them. It was terrifying, amazing and wonderful, all at once. Legolas had honored him with the voyage, as a friend, as a swordbrother, as one who had weathered the same storms, as the last of the Fellowship in Middle-earth. Others here had honored him as Member of the Fellowship, as Companion and Guardian of the Ringbearer. As Lockbearer, the one who Galadriel herself had honored so long ago in another world. And as one who had helped rebuild Minas Tirith; that great city of the Edain, the people in whose blood and stone and trees and tales flowed the last shreds of memory, of knowledge, of the beauty of the Eldar.
Well, enough ceremony already. It was time to kick back on the beach. Drink another rum. Stare at Elbereth's stars glinting through the swaying palms. Gimli listened to the song coming from the next fire. The soft voices from just beyond the breakers. He stared up at the wheeling stars among the treeshadow. Like the lights on that tree Legolas had described, what was it? Tannenbaum. Yes, that was it. What a good idea. Gimli wondered if there was some way to make those little lights, and what would power them.
And that thing he slid on the snow with...what was that? Ah yes, the snowboard. There were mountains here, or so the Lady Caranfin had said. Somewhere there was snow, and if a certain Dwarf was too old for such silliness, there were Elves who would delight in sliding down a mountain at what was it? Warp ten. That would be worth watching. Maybe they would have contests, do some of the tricks Legolas remembered seeing. How did he describe that thing they used...half a tube...tunnel...pipe, that was it, half-pipe.
He was still deep in musings about many of the strange things Legolas had told him of the world of Lizard and Lorien when shadows appeared on the other side of the fire. Legolas and one other Elf were there, with the great box slung between them. They lowered it to the sand, by the blanket spread by the fire. "Hannon le, Voronwe." said Legolas.
Gimli didn't catch the soft words said by the other. He smiled and nodded to the Dwarf, almost a bow, then wandered down the beach, walking as lightly on the deep sand as Legolas had on the snows of Caradhras.
"Tolo." Legolas said softly, "Come."
Gimli heaved himself out of his comfortable throne and stumped barefoot as a Hobbit through the soft warm sand. He knelt by the great chest...with a bit less speed and a few more aches than he would ever admit to. Legolas touched part of the carving on the side, and Gimli heard a distinct click.
The lid swung open.
Gimli leaned over it, wondering what would be within; treasure? Gold? Jewels? No, in his travels with the Elf he had found far more beautiful things than the bright things dug from the earth; three hairs from the most beautiful woman in any world, the smile of a friend, the laughter of a Hobbit, the warmth of sun. Solid land underfoot.
He peered inside. "Books?" he box seemed to be filled with them. On top was one large thick book; Legolas drew it forth and opened it. His face broke into a great grin.
Gimli poked at a picture, small, but so real it might have moved. "That is you! But what are those strange clothes you are wearing? And...wait...is that the snowboard you were telling me about?"
"Yes." Legolas said laughing. "There is Lizard, and Lorien. This is one of the books we made of the pictures from Lorien's camera."
Gimli scanned several of the other pictures on the two pages before him, "Lorien seems to be on the ground a lot."
Legolas' smile softened. He flipped to another page. "Here, this one is better."
"Ahhhh." Gimli studied the picture, "What was that phrase they used? Ah yes. How do you say you are a hottie in your tongue?"
Legolas gave him a startled look.
"What?"
Legolas studied the bearded face of his friend closely.
"Well?" Gimli said.
"Noooooo no no no no. Celeborn would not be amused."
"Hmmmph. I was not going to use it in his presence. And anyway, I was thinking of another lady..."
"Yule." Legolas said abruptly, and flipped through more of the great book; sled dogs and galloping horses, tall ships and trees, indricotheres and Dragonkin, the wonders of Wal-Mart. Two lovely young ladies as different as Elf and Dwarf. And a blue Elf with a tail.
"Is this your Nightcrawler?" Gimli asked.
"Yes, that is Kurtvagner." Legolas set the photo album in Gimli's lap and reached back into the chest. He pulled out a handful of thin, brightly colored books. The cover of one held something that looked like a ship with a hero swinging through the rigging wielding a sword. The hero was blue and had a tail, though he looked a little different from the man in the photos. "These are his tales." Legolas pulled out the rest, a great pile of the thin, colorful books, and laid them carefully on the blanket. "These are the ones from Nazgul Barbie's house! All of them! And that is a great gift!"
"Can you read their tongue?"
"Yes. Yes! I remember it now." He paged gleefully through one of the copies, his grin growing ever wider.
"There's enough there for days and days of stories. Weeks. Months." Gimli frowned thoughtfully.
"There is that young Elf I met yesterday...he draws...hmmmm. And he has a friend who tells stories. Hmmmm."
Legolas smiled in understanding, "There are always more stories to tell." He looked into the depths of the chest.
"What else, what else?" Gimli leaned forward, peering into the chest.
Legolas drew forth a carved box, "Doc made this. Lizard and Lorien's idea." He held out his hands, the box balanced in it, as if it held a treasure as great as Galadriel's locks. "Especially for you." he said.
Gimli stared, surprised, "Me?"
"They liked you too."
"Me?" Gimli repeated.
"They knew of you from the tale, of course."
He took the box, opened it with barely contained excitement. He held up a strange device, one eyebrow cocked quizzically. "What is this?"
Legolas smiled, "Wal-Mart holds many treasures. That is a carving tool." He dug further into the box. "Here are the attachements that go on it, like the different kinds of knives you usually use. You plug this..." he held up a long black cord, "into an electrical..."
"Wait." Gimli frowned at the contraption, "You spoke of Mother Bell once. The power of ee-lick-tricity. How are you going to power this? There is no Vala named Mother Bell here!"
"This," Legolas pulled something else out of the great chest, something like a window, patterned in blue, "is a solar panel. The whole thing is powered by a battery which is recharged by sunlight."
"What? What magic is this? Magic of the Edain?"
"No, of the Dwarves. Something Doc put together, though the Edain have things like it. It's just that his is even better."
Gimli beamed with pride, "Hah!" he chuckled. "Hah hah!" He beamed and turned the strange device, like a fat handled knife over in his hands.
"It is much faster than knives." Legolas added.
Gimli's face had begun to get that dreamy look that meant he was thinking of a new project. Of several. Many.
"Ahem. Yule." Legolas reached back into the chest, and pulled out a great thick book. He flipped it open and smiled, this time with an ache to it, a smile full of joy and sorrow all at once.
"What?" Gimli said leaning closer.
"Our tale." Legolas said softly. He turned the pages and pictures flashed by.
Gimli set a finger down, stopping the turning pages at one of the pictures. "That is Strider. And you. And me. Well, it does not look exactly like us, but it must be."
"Yes."
Gimli stroked a finger across the page, "I feel no paint."
"It is as I told you. They have a way of making many copies, all alike. But the original pictures were in paint. Watercolor, on paper. Done by a Man, one of the Edain, but one who must have had an Elfheart, Alanlee."
"His name even sounds a bit Elvish." Gimli agreed.
"Here is more," Legolas dug into the chest and pulled out a strange small flat chest. He clicked it open and Gimli could not make out what it was supposed to be. It opened like the halves of a clam, one half having a sort of dark window. There were other little boxes that seemed to go with it. Legolas poked at it.
"Perhaps this book tells you something about it." Gimli suggested as something small fell out of it.
Legolas picked up the book and studied it. "Ah, yes. The instruction manual. What was it Dana used to say?" He dropped his brows and his voice took on a serious tone, "Real Men don't need instructions. Just a bigger hammer."
Gimli studied it closely, "It seems to be powered by more of your eelicktrissity."
"Yes. Maybe you can figure out how it works. Show some of our craftsmen how to make more. There seem to be spare parts here." Legolas reached back into the box and pulled out a flat square bit of shiny color. He played with it for a moment and opened it. And popped a circle of silver out of it.
Gimli's eyes widened, for rainbows danced across the surface of the silver circle. "This is one of your rainbows...what did you call them? Letters, they give everything names that are only letters...ooooohhh. DVD! That was it!"
"Yes." Legolas studied the Dwarvish contraption before him.
Gimli thrust the small book under his nose again. "I have left my hammer at the beachouse, so you should probably read this."
Legolas took it, scowled at it, poked at a few buttons on the surface of the box thing with the window; a little tray slid forth from it. Legolas laid one of the round rainbow disks on it and it was obediently swallowed. He poked a few more buttons and...
"Ohhhhh." Gimli breathed. Life and color and movement danced across the window. It was like looking through a window into another world.
Legolas stared at it, then broke into a great huge grin. Quietly, breathlessly he said, "This is our tale too! The one Liz and Lorien told me about."
"The movie?"
"Yes!"
"Hah hah hah!" Gimli laughed in delight.
Legolas flicked through the menu, as he had eons ago in another world, with other movies.
"There are more of these DVDs in here. A lot more." Gimli said, peering into the chest. He pulled out a few, "Here is Kurtvagner again."
"Yes, there were some movies of the adventures of his team. Favorites of Lorien."
Gimli waved another one under Legolas' nose.
"That's the pirate one, very good." Legolas pointed with some pride to one of the people on the cover, "This one here is me. Well, he is in this other movie, in our tale."
Gimli frowned at the cover, "He doesn't look at all like you." He grinned mischievously, "He's much better looking."
"Hah hah, very funny."
Gimli seemed to think so, for he was laughing very loudly.
"Here, look, this one is you." Legolas poked at something on the windowbox and the picture froze on a short stout Dwarvish fellow.
"It is not."
"It is!"
"I am not that short."
"You are."
"I have a much better nose..."
"No, it is the same."
"His eyes are too squinty, the Lady Caranfin likened my eyes to the glint of obsidian, to the shine of..."
Legolas' face showed startlement, and the wish to know more. Far more.
"Nevermind." Gimli said, settling back and crossing his arms like a fortress gate.
Legolas' face broke into a knowing smile.
"Well, are we going to watch it or not?"
"Yes, mellon nin, but tonight? It is very long. For a Dwarf, at least. And perhaps you have other things you would like to attend to?"
"I'm not going anywhere, and you have all the time in the world. And we can invite the others, can we not?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well then, what are we waiting for."
And so it came to pass that on nights when the stars of Elbereth glittered out of sky as velvet and black as the dark of a Dwarf delving, when the wind came fresh off the Great Sea, out of the east, as the gulls wheeled and wailed overhead, and the surf boomed like a great drum, the Elves of Eressea would gather around the storytelling fire, and bank it down to embers, then the last of the Fellowship would come forth to tell their great tale, while the trees swayed in the wind from the sea, and the sandpipers called from the edges of...
"Legolas..."
"What?"
"Would you just hit the play button already?"





~~ tele ~~
But our back is to legends and we are coming home, said Bilbo. (The Hobbit)





PART THE SIXTH, APPENDIX, SPLEEN, WHATEVER...


...in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien, we bring you the...
Appendix
(cerebellum, pancreas, whatever)

"You look like an Elf in that shirt." Kid behind me in my art class in the early 70s. My flowy hippie thing looked like a refugee from Galadriel's yard sale.
"What? Like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?"

Step into the tardis, my friends, we're going to 1977.
Somewhere on the high desert of southeastern Oregon, a wild black mare is born. I'll meet her, and she will train me, in 1985.
At Inner Harbor in Baltimore MD, another "wild black mare" is launched. She is a reproduction of the wicked swift and agile privateers of the War of 1812. I will sail on her sister, the Pride of Baltimore II, on Halloween of 2007.
Check out the movies: there's this new science fiction film, looking totally unlike the sleek, shiny films of the past, with princesses and heroes with glowing swords and wizards and wookies: Star Wars!
And I discover fanfiction and fandom and... a fellow fan dumps a vast pile of reading material into my hands. "You must read this," she intones. I stare at the immense stack of verbiage and pale. Lo!, in my copious free time, somewhere in the next millennium.
The epic tome is J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Somewhat later, I borrowed a tent from a second cousin twice removed, so I could spend a week on a desert island called Assateague. He told me about this game they played: D&D. I showed up, rolled up a character, waved the paper at the DM and said, "What do I make of this?"
"Play an Elf."
"What?" You mean like Herbie, in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer?
"It's Hermie. Read Lord of the Rings."

I did, sort of backwards, starting with the appendices and an attempt to understand this Elf thing. I saw a great set of illustrations (a pullout poster in a magazine) of various scenes from LOTR by Judy King-Rieniets.
"Who's the blond guy with the longbow?"
He might, of course, turn out to be a dumb character, I thought, despite the attractiveness of the illustration. He did not. He said things like "there is too little that grows here and is glad", ran over the snow to find the sun, knew how to paddle the swift forest river, and best of all...
"A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. But Legolas asked them to take off saddle and rein. 'I need them not,' he said, and leaped lightly up, and to their wonder Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts. Gimli was lifted up behind his friend, and he clung to him, not much more at ease than Sam Gamgee in a boat."

Thusly inspired, I trained my patient Anglo-Arab gelding to work without "saddle and rein" (at least in an arena), well enough to do a demo for our medieval living history group.

Thusly inspired, I went off to have more adventures, like the ones I'd read about.
I learned to hit the broadside of a stack of haybales with an arrow, to wield broadswords (rattan and steel). I slept rolled in a wool cloak by a few fires. Sailed (uh, mostly rowed) a Viking longship ( , come out and play with us), spent Halloween on one pirate ship and an earthquake on another (Pride of Baltimore II and Kalmar Nyckel).
I volunteered with wildlife rehabbers and wrangled biting otters and barfing vultures, got "handcuffed" to a perch by Iris the one-eyed great horned owl and demonstrated projectile pooping to third graders with Thermal the Wonder Hawk (a hefty redtail). I learned that baby Bambis are deadly (four feet armed with slicer-dicer kung-fu hooves) and wrestled a (very small) tiger.
My sea kayak has taken me many places, including the Haunted Lagoon (setting for a Dana Girls mystery on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands VA), and many not-nearly-dead-enough marshes. I have had salad plate sized, decidedly cartiliginous fins surface at the end of my paddle blade (is that a 16 foot shark?... no, just a cownosed ray).
I spent at least one Thanksgiving (and a couple of sundances) with the "Indians" (Dakota, Haliwa Saponi and others), and one Halloween working with a lovely young man with a great Dracula accent... because he was, in fact, from Transylvania (wryly; "All you Americans know of us is Dracula."). I've had the honor of working with a whole Middle Earth of interesting people, each with their own stories; the guy from Nepal who, walking home with his buddies as a kid, saw a tiger cross the road in front of them, the Hungarian lady who came here for love, and stayed because... America, the young men fleeing war in Africa, the people of a broad range of religions who showed me a new viewpoint.
The first "wild black mare" was a life-long dream; inspired by Fury, the Black Stallion, and Zorro's horse. Her name was Olori Eldalie, (Elven Magic/Dream). I think she may have been a pooka...
The other "wild black mare" is this:
I have decorated Yule trees and carved The Gourd of the Rings underwater (scuba divers get bored if they can't get to Bon Aire), and won one division in the underwater tricycle race. The quarry in this tale is based on ones I've dived in.
I trained my own two-dog mushing team.. then a 3 1/4 dog team; the 1/4th was Max the Hobbit Husky, a 16 pound Schipperke.
I've walked into a South Carolina sea island swamp to look at the moon... and heard a massive roar all too close (you never see the gator, you just hear it... and the splash splash splash...).
I've dabbled in martial arts but am nowhere as good as Liz (now I do some tai chi, for, as Roy Rogers once said, I don't bounce anymore).
I perpetrated art and fanfiction and finally my own original stories and characters... who could just not stay out of this tale. Bran... BRAN, COME BACK HERE WITH THAT!
I commit art and writing but haven't quit my day job. Nixon County Park in York County PA, has allowed me to smear paint on their walls and paid me nicely for it.
My favorite is the wetland mural (based mostly on photos I shot from my kayak), eleven feet of chipmunk burrow, Raptor Red (a life sized Utahraptor standee), and "Soil, It's Not Just Dirt" (ask me about the dancing salamanders).

The petroglyph rock is real. It is called Big Indian Rock and lies about 1/4 mile south of the Safe Harbor Dam on the Susquehanna river. There really are glyphs that sort of look like Nightcrawler and friends (archetype, archetype). There are websites devoted to the rock and its petroglyphs. If you go, walk softly (bare or stocking feet), take nothing but pictures, leave nothing, not even footprints... except perhaps, sage for the spirits of the place.
I climb exactly the way Lorien does. I snowboarded once, I'll stick to the dogsled. I still can't tell a sparrow from a finch even with binoculars. Bambi is tasty.

Adventure, as they say in UP, is out there. Go find one. The Adventure that is Middle Earth inspired me to go have a few of my own. And to write a few of my own. May it inspire you to go forth and find yours.

You can bamf if you want to
you can leave your chair behind...
...then write your own tale.

FIND ME HERE AND ON FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, YOUTUBE, AND OTHER RANDO PLACES.

The Inkitt version of this tale has illustrations and photos by me. It is presently goobered, because the techies reformatted stuff so the entire book looks rather like it's trying to be poetry... it's still readable. Some of the pictures are also here: https://www.swordwhale.com/illos-for-if-wishes-were-elves.html

Language! I plucked the Elvish bits from .org. The elvish at the beginning of Legolas's paragraphs are Sindarin counting from . Though my grandparents and other ancestors spoke a German dialect, I am, like most Americans, linguistically impaired. Nightcrawler's German dialog is lifted from the original comics, and the web. I must thank reader, (and librarian!) Birgit Arensmann for timely help in fixing some problems! Sorry Nighty, still can't find the funny squiggle thingie on my keyboard...
I happen to prefer the British spelling of certain words like grey, armour and harbour. I find myself saying things like "bloody". I blame it on Doctor Who and Sherlock.


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