Nimuviel’s Diary: Page 15

Iavas day 37, Breeland Travelling goes faster with my companion! Randir knows the roads of this land much better than I do and between us the gathering of food and setting up camp goes much and much quicker than I would have been able to do on my own. We passed the town of Bree a few days ago and I only saw it from a distance, as we took care to go out of our way to the south so that we would not be noticed. The evenings are less long now than they seemed before and less lonely, for I have company now and we exchange more and more conversation as the days pass. Randir knows Sindarin so that we can converse more easily than we would have if I had been forced to speak Westron, and he tells me that the sound of my language to his ears puts his mind at rest and that his being able to speak it with me now makes him joyful in a way. Indeed he smiles more than I remember others of his folk do before him, and he seems more inclined to conversation than them as well. Sometimes we pass ruins in the daytime, old walls still standing, but in disarray, and often inhabited by creatures such as do not wish to bear the light of Anor; and then when we sit in the evening and talk somewhat underneath the stars, Randir tells me what this ruin was of old, and what it looked like, and what purpose it served, and who lived there, and what their lives were like, and how it all ended. He knows so much of history and it seems to me as if he has been there and seen all this happen with his own eyes, even though I know this to be impossible, and I am the elder of us two; when I asked him about it, he said he was able to broaden his mind by extensive reading in his younger days, and hearing this made my thoughts go back to my own younger days, when Adar placed a library full of books at my disposal and urged me to use it, and the reluctance I felt then at reading these books, for they seemed so dull and dead to me compared to the wood I could craft and turn to much more interesting shapes than sheets of paper. Perhaps, when I return to I Randír Îdh from my Task, I will use the library there. I wish I could tell Randir new stories too, but he seems to know many of mine already, having heard them before in his people’s camp in the hills north of where Lin Giliath used to be. I did show him how to carve a small swan out of a piece of wood, and he seemed very pleased with it. He carries it with him in his pocket now and says he will have a brooch made out of it when he finds opportunity, and this made me smile, for it brings me joy to see that I have crafted him some small thing of worth to him.