OOC: Author's Notes
Status: Complete - Part II contains all 5 entries (5/5).
These stories form a multi-part chronicle, which can be found here. They follow from a series of tales involving the Company of the East Road. These are not required reading, but if you're curious, you can read a digest/summary of them here.
Stories in this Part are as follows (click to jump directly to them, or scroll down):
- "The Grey Path Forward"
- "The Watcher Of The Hollin Ridge"
- "The Forging of Absolutes"
- "The Last Firelight Before The Door"
- "One Word" (new addition)
Nairdalis' Diary: Entry Six – "The Grey Path Forward"
The land is quiet here. The hills stretch long and low, cloaked in heather and wind, the silence broken only by the whisper of grass or the rare cry of a hawk turning on the breeze. I have passed into the Angle now, where old stone lies half-buried in the dust and the rivers draw together like threads in a loom. There is beauty in it, though a dry, weary kind. This is a land that has known sorrow for longer than I have walked it.
And I have walked far. I tell myself it is Lothlórien that calls me eastward, that I honour the price my father named. But I no longer know if that is the truth, or merely the shape I give to it. Each step I take seems to echo louder than the last.
I think of Deorla. Not as she was at the end, cloaked in masks and shadow, but as she stood beside the fire when we first met. Laughing. Bold. Unafraid. She claimed the shadow, but not for the sake of darkness it seemed. No, it was something else, a deeper purpose, or perhaps a wound too long left untended. Was I wrong to walk away from her? Or was I wrong to ever follow?
There is a fault line inside me I cannot name.
I begin to see it in the land itself. These are the borderlands, where folk live with little and survive by wit or will. They do not call their lives good or evil; they endure. I have passed by villages of Men with no names known to maps, where children play in dust and elders sit silent in the fading light. Their joys are small, but real. Their sorrows, deep.
And yet, they do not falter.
They live in something I cannot name, something between hope and grief. Not light. Not dark.
I hesitate to call it grey. I still do not know what that word means. I thought it meant compromise. Failure. The slow death of principle. But perhaps it is something else. A space where choices are made not in certainty, but in care.
Still, I cannot be sure. I feel I circle the truth but do not touch it.
The world is neither black nor white, no matter how much we long for it to be. I thought that by returning to Lothlórien, I would escape the grey. But now I know, there is no escape. Is it not so that in the light of the stars themselves, we exist in the shadow of the world?
I think of my father, of the way he has always twisted love into something that serves his needs. I will go back to him, but I will not be the same. The Elves of Lothlórien live in their own kind of grey, suspended between the fading light of the world and the darkness that looms ever closer. I must find my place there, but I wonder if it is a place that can ever be mine.
The Company was born in such a space, between roads, between worlds. Not wholly bound to law or crown, nor lost to chaos. We were meant to walk the margins, to protect what others overlook. And perhaps that is why things faltered. Or perhaps it is why they mattered….
I do not know.
The road ahead rises. I see the western edge of the Hollin Ridge in the far distance, etched with dusk. Soon I will cross into Eregion. And beyond that, the mountains.
I have not decided what I will do when I reach the door.
Not truly.
Nairdalis' Diary: Entry Seven – "The Watcher of the Hollin Ridge”
There is a place where the land forgets its name. No cairns mark it, no song names its hills. Just low, wind-carved ridges and thorny scrub clinging to soil grown thin with time. From here, the old road can be seen faintly in the valley below - a silver line of memory running east to west, not unlike the scar of a wound that never quite healed.
I lingered there at dusk, after a hard climb and a long silence. The air had cooled, though the sky burned red behind me. It was the kind of red that makes you think of old things - blood dried on stone, ash stirred in a hearth long grown cold. The hills did not welcome me, but neither did they resist. They simply endured.
I had not expected company.
But as I rounded the shoulder of a ridge, I found him already there. A man, or something like one - grey-cloaked, quiet, his shape made half of shadow, half of light. He stood as if carved from the rock, his gaze fixed on the eastern horizon. I do not know how long he had been there. Perhaps he had always been.
When he turned to look at me, it was without surprise or concern. There was no greeting, no question. Only a shared understanding that we had both arrived at this empty place, in a time not meant for meetings.
His eyes were... old. Not in years - he was no greybeard, no stooped wanderer - but in the way a tree is old, gnarled beneath the bark, knowing too many winters. Eyes like that do not seek comfort. They measure.
We stood for a time without words. The wind carried no song, only the hush of fading light. Then, as the first stars appeared, pale and distant, he spoke.
"Do you think it’s better," he asked, "to wait for light... or to carry it yourself, even if it burns?"
He said no more.
And I, for once, had no answer.
He left before the moon rose. He did not walk down the ridge but vanished around its curve, soundless, certain. I did not follow.
Even now, I cannot say what he was. A ranger, perhaps, or a dream borne from the hills of Eregion. Maybe a memory that the land itself wears like a mantle. But his words have stayed with me, heavier than they seemed at the time.
I keep thinking of fire. Of the kind you hold too long and cannot put down without pain. Of light you never fully understand, but must carry all the same.
Have I carried such light? Or have I merely waited... waited for a world that never quite arrives, a clarity that never quite settles?
I wonder, too, whether Deorla burned. Not only in her fall, but in her life. She chose her path, wrong or right, and walked it without looking back. Choices were made, weren’t they? Perhaps choices were made for her… no… no… choices have to be accepted ultimately, even if they are not of your own crafting. Have I ever done the same?
The Company of the East Road... Not perfect, not pure, but striving. Stubborn in our service, even if some disagreed on what that service meant. We made difficult choices - some tainted… I now see… some…. necessary. But that was our…. strength. Did I abandon that? Was my leaving a form of waiting? Just a hope that some clearer path would show itself?
There are watchers in these hills - old eyes, in rock and ruin, in the hush between breaths. I feel them. Not judging. Not warning. Waiting. Waiting for what I will do next.
Tomorrow I reach the valley of the Walls of Moria. The Doors of Durin will be close. I can already feel their presence, like a weight drawing my thoughts inward.
Is passing through the doors a choice? Is it a choice of my own to make?
I begin to understand that the grey is not a thing to flee. It is the cost of living with eyes open. And perhaps, even now, it is not too late to choose to carry something forward... even if it burns and means forwards is backwards...
Nairdalis' Diary: Entry Eight – "The Forging of Absolutes”
The road to Moria twists ever onward, winding through the lands of Eregion as shadows stretch long across the hills. The air feels heavier, burdened by history, and the whisper of ancient powers lingers in the winds that blow through these lands.
Echad Mirobel stands as a silent sentinel, its ancient stones weathered by time and the ceaseless march of history. I have heard much of this place in stories, of its role as a haven for the Elves, its connection to the lost city of Ost-in-Edhil, and its proximity to the mines of Moria, where greed and ambition wove their doom into the very fabric of the world.
In the stillness of the evening, I find myself alone by the remains of what was once a place of great knowledge and craft. The old walls are crumbling, though remnants of their glory remain, a flicker of what once was. This was once a centre of Elven wisdom, where the great Smiths of Eregion laboured to forge the Rings of Power. The thought chills my heart. How I loathe to think on such things, on those treacherous Rings, with their allure of power and their eventual corruption of even the noblest of hearts. Every elf knows of this, we feel it. At least… we did, this has now waned… since the destruction of the One.
I have walked this road before, and the weight of its history has never left me. The rings were tools of absolute control. The Elves believed they could wield the power of the world, to preserve, protect, and heal, but what they created, in their arrogance, was a prison for their own wills. They thought themselves beyond corruption, and yet they too fell to the allure of domination.
The Rings were never meant to be simply powerful. They were meant to be absolute. There was no grey in their design, no room for doubt or compromise. They were an answer, a solution, to the ever-growing uncertainty of the world. To possess one was to control fate itself, at least, so it seemed. But no one can control fate. Not the Elves. Not the Men. And certainly not the Dwarves.
In my own life, it seems clearer to me now that I have often walked a path between the light and the shadow, living in that grey space where the right choice is never clear, where the temptation to act on power, control, or fear, beckons with every decision. But the Rings—they were different. They were an answer that could not bend. They were absolute.
Yet here I am, walking the same path, seeking absolute answers in ancient places, instead of recognising that it is in uncertain places where truth hides its face.
I used to believe that the world needed clarity... that it must be seen in black or white, light or shadow (…that is my Father talking through me…). But those who see the world that way become blind to what lies between.
The Rings were absolute, and in their absoluteness they failed. The world is not built on certainty, it moves, it shifts, it adapts. The Elves could not see that. Nor could the Men. And perhaps I too have spent too long chasing solid ground beneath a sky that never stops changing. It is the way of the World.
If there is wisdom to be taken from these ruined lands, it is this: the grey is not a failure of vision. It is the truest vision we are allowed. To walk the grey path is not to be lost... it is to remain free, even when the world demands allegiance to one extreme or the other.
The Rings promised order, but they left no space for choice. And in that, they betrayed the very thing they were meant to protect.
My mind thinks of walking the grey path forward, not because I am unsure... but because I must remain unsure. That is where truth waits. Not in certainty, but in the questions we carry with us….
Nairdalis' Diary: Entry Nine – "The Last Firelight Before the Door”
Gwingris is a haven stitched from the remnants of greater things - a patch of order clinging to the wilderness beyond. The folk here are tired, but enduring, like moss clinging to old stone. Rangers rest on watch, elves pass through with supplies, and dwarves gather in growing number, laden with picks and plans and the heavy dreams of reclaiming what was lost.
I arrived on foot in the dusk, boots thick with dust, expecting silence and suspicion. But a dwarf with a riotous red beard and mismatched boots insisted I share his fire before I’d even said my name. "Looks like you’ve been chased all the way from Tharbad," he said, squinting at me over his pipe. “Sit, sit! No one walks alone past Gwingris, not unless they mean to start trouble, or end it,” he said, and barked a laugh like breaking bark.
His name was Tralin, son of Bavor, of the Line of the Broadbeam. He insisted on reciting it properly, even as he burnt a fish he had been tending over the fire. His boots didn’t match, his nose had clearly been broken twice, and he told such stories with a theatrical violence bordering on the obscene, or a tale about a goat who headbutted a cave troll so hard it forgot its own name. He swore it was true. I laughed until I choked.
He offered me salted fish, far too dry, and launched into another twisting story of a mule who could sniff out orc scouts better than a warg could. I laughed. A real laugh, the first in... I do not know how long. There was warmth in it, in the company, in the closeness of dusk fires and small kindnesses. For a moment I felt almost like myself again, or perhaps like someone I had once been, in a time before long roads and heavy choices.
His brother, Doril, quiet, sharp-eyed, sat at the fire’s edge, whittling a piece of hickory into the shape of a mountain ram. He spoke little, but when he smiled, it was as if a shutter opened on some deep and ancient light.
They were both bound for Moria. Their ancestors had carved stone there. “We’re not going for gold,” Tralin said. “We go for ghosts... to make them proud.”
It was a foolish thing, perhaps. Two dwarves with little more than iron and firelight, hoping to walk halls long since drowned in shadow. But there was hope in it. And I, so long haunted by the silence of roads, I basked in their fire, warmed not by the flames but by their company.
Before sleep, Tralin handed me a silver button. "It fell from your cloak," he said, though I knew it hadn’t. "Keep it. Luck finds those who receive tokens."
I left before dawn. They still slept, curled close to the embers. I meant to return. I almost turned back. But I didn’t. I thought I would see them again on the road.
By noon, the sky turned to smoke.
I turned back.
Tralin was dead. So was his brother. The camp torn, smashed.
Orcs had come with the mist, fast, brutal. Rangers said it was a scouting band. Just a raid. They always say that, as though scale lessens sorrow.
The fire pit was overturned. The mule lay dying beneath a crushed tent post, its eye wide with terror. Dori had fought. There were seven bodies around him. Seven. Tralin had no blade left in his hands, just a hammer split at the shaft, blood on both fists, and that damn crooked smile frozen in his face like he’d been laughing even then.
They burned the brothers together.
I stayed until nothing remained but blackened bones and the smell of pine.
A ranger said, “They died brave,” and I wanted to scream. As though dying brave made the dying less.
I walked to the river alone. Found the place where Tralin had said he caught frogs the day before and tried to convince me they were a delicacy in Belegost.
I sat in the mud and wept. For him. For Dori. For the absurd, foolish hope of reclaiming a kingdom that would never again be whole. For laughter now lost to ash.
The button is in my pack. I haven’t touched it. I don’t know if it’s lucky... or cursed. Maybe it’s both.
When I look at the mountains now, I feel no pull of wonder, only a weight behind my ribs. The Door is close. The path winds up through the pines, and soon I’ll stand before the doors my kind once passed through in reverence or fear.
But tonight, the fire is gone, and the world feels colder than it did before I found it.
I do not know why this struck so deep. I have seen worse things. Lost more than strangers at a campfire. But grief is not a measured thing. It finds the crack and presses in.
Soon I will stand before that door. I will carry Tralin’s story with me to Moria. Not for vengeance, nor honour... but because someone ought to remember how brightly he laughed around that campfire and of how freely he shared his heart with a total stranger.
Nairdalis' Diary: Entry Ten – "One Word”
We each must come to the edge of the world in our own way. Mine has led me here, through ash and echo, across forgotten stones and beneath trees older than my name. And now at last I stand in the starlit hush beneath the looming face of the Mountains of Mist. Here, where light is carved upon stone, where silence holds its breath before a door that does not age, I wait.
The Door waits also.
There is no sound in this place, save for the wind’s faint cry through the pass. No birdsong. No insect’s wing. Not even the sigh of shifting stone. The air is too still. Too solemn. As if even the mountain holds its breath in reverence.
The Door waits.
The gate is beautiful, and terrible. Lines of silver fire etched across black stone, ancient words bound in shape and light. A memory wrought in Mithril. A boundary not merely of place, but of fate.
The Door waits.
I have only to speak the word and pass within.
But I do not speak. My voice is a prisoner in my throat. My feet do not move.
Speak ‘friend’ and enter. That is the legend. So simple, so kindly. But what path lies beyond? Into darkness, certainly. Into memory. Into the slow echoing halls of the dead, and then beyond, to the heart of the Golden Wood. To HIM.
Ceneshar called me home, and I obeyed... or told myself I did. I chose the long road. Too long. I said it was for safety, or thought, or perhaps for closure. But the truth is simpler.
I was not ready to kneel.
I am still not.
My father’s will is like stone - quiet, enduring, unrelenting. His voice may be soft, his eyes filled with memory, but there is iron beneath it all. He shaped me for purpose, as one might shape a blade. Not for joy. Not for freedom. But to serve what he deems worthy - blood, memory, silence, duty. Love, yes. But never a love freely given.
And now to return... is to surrender. Not only my will, but all that I became when I left.
He will not scold. He will smile. He will draw me in, speak of honour and the needs of the realm, and sit me beside him in councils I did not choose. He will dress me in silks and parade my return as a victory. He will not need to punish me.
I will already have forfeited everything that made me mine.
And yet... I would be home.
Safe. Silent. Still.
I have travelled far to reach this door - farther than most will ever know. Through ruin and thorn. Over broken bridges and forgotten watchfires. I have walked where even the birds did not fly. Through shadowed hills, over rivers swollen with silence, under skies that held neither omen nor comfort. And in every quiet place, one question has followed me:
Was I wrong to leave?
I thought I would find peace in return. A quieting of the storm. Honour, perhaps. Obedience. The restoration of something lost. I believed my presence in Bree-land had become a kind of poison - that my choices had bred discord, and that by surrendering to my father’s summons, I could give meaning to the path behind me.
But that was a lie.
Clarity is not truth.
Truth is what lives in the space between things - between light and dark, between right and wrong. It is found in the grey, where nothing is certain, and every choice is a burden.
The Company of the East Road lives in that grey.
And it always has. I see that now.
They were not heroes of tale or song. They were not pure. They were not even always good. They drank too much. Fought too often. Lied when it served them, stole when they must. They were half-broken, sharp-eyed, muddied folk. Some bore scars older than the road itself. Others wore masks even they had forgotten the shape of. But still...
They stood.
They held the line. They guarded the road. They raised blades not for glory, but for need. They bent rules and broke laws to bring goods where they were needed. They forged peace between folk who had none. They laughed too loudly. Cursed too often. But when danger stirred, they stood in its path.
They chose to be good.
And that... is no small thing.
In a world like ours, goodness is not the absence of flaw. It is not cleanness or clarity. It is defiance; a flame lit in the wind. It must be chosen - again and again and again. And the very choosing is the cost.
I see that now.
Somehow, amidst all their failings, the Company had something real. Something I did not even know I was seeking. Past glory. Beyond kinship. A kind of truth that only lives in the grey. A stubborn, battered kind of hope.
I thought I had failed them when I left. That my doubts made me unworthy. But now I see... the grey is not weakness. It is the only place left where truth can live.
Mortals understand this. Their lives are short, but they do not wait for certainty. They love, even knowing grief. They fight, even knowing loss. They believe, even through ruin. They live in the grey, because they must.
And perhaps so must I.
When I departed Bree-land, I called it duty. I claimed to be following a summons. But now I know - I was fleeing. Fleeing the burden of choice. Fleeing the mess. Fleeing the grey.
But it clung to me.
And it still does.
Deorla is the proof.
She was one of us. For a time. Silent, sharp-eyed, sure-footed. We never truly knew her. Perhaps she never knew herself.
I trusted her. I distrusted her. I admired her. I feared her. And when her truth came to light, when her shadow grew too wide to ignore, I told myself she was different. Separate. That her fall had nothing to do with me.
But it did.
Her path was ours, taken to a darker end. Her descent was only the most honest reflection of what we all risk becoming. Those who dwell in the grey too long may forget how to name the light. But just as easily, they may learn to use the dark as a tool and call it good.
She stepped beyond the grey, and never came back.
What if I had reached for her?
What if someone had?
In the end, she walked alone. And I cannot help but ask - did we let her? Did I?
She bore her shadow quietly. So do I. So do we all.
When I think of Deorla, of her descent, I wonder, did I once walk her path, but in the opposite direction? Was my desire to protect, to shield, to save, only an echo of the same instinct that initially drew her toward Sauron’s call? Perhaps she grew up without choices, without the freedom of taking a different path…. perhaps the very notion of light and dark, of right and wrong, is just an illusion.
The grey lies between them, a place where neither can dominate.
I thought I had escaped it, but as I stand before this door, I realize—I have been walking in it all along. In my choices, my actions, my thoughts.
If I pass through this door, the road ends. My name will vanish from the wild lands. My choices will belong to my father, to the court, to silence. There will be no return. That is the price.
And that is what stills my voice.
Because somewhere out there, the Company still treads the edge.
I do not know what shape they’ve taken now, who remains, or what they remember. But I do know this: the world is worse without such souls, flawed though they may be. Someone must remind them that walking in the grey is not failure.
… The door remains shut. The word unsaid. My hand hovers near the stone, but it does not touch. I should cross. I should go. My father will not wait forever, and the price of disobedience will be steep. But it is not fear that holds me.
It is the memory of what we tried to build. A fragile, faltering Company that, for a time, stood against the dark, not because we were pure, but because we were stubborn enough to keep choosing good, even when it cost us. I did not stay to fight for it then. But perhaps it is not too late.
The stars are watching.
My hand rests on the stone.
One word.
Only one.
But I do not speak it.
Not yet.
A silence like snowfall gathers on the threshold, and I feel the weight of every step that brought me here. My hand hovers still above the stone…
Not yet.
And then—I am not alone.
Just for a moment there is a ripple in the water behind me… and then… again…. nothing….
I feel it before I see him. The prickling shift in the air. The shadow stretched too long along the rocks behind me. The faint catch of boot against gravel, so soft it might have been imagined.
He stands a short distance off, half-shaped by moonlight, cloaked and still. The same figure I glimpsed once upon the ridge in Hollin, when the wind changed and the road seemed to draw breath. I remember the tilt of his head, the patience in his posture, watching, not threatening. Not then.
Not now.
He does not speak. Nor do I.
But something in his bearing tells me he knew I would come here. That he has been waiting, not to bar my way, but to see which path I would choose.
A witness. A measure. Perhaps an emissary of something I do not yet understand.
He raises a hand, not in warning, not in farewell, but in stillness. A quiet signal. As though to say: you are not the only one who walks the grey.
Then he turns, and begins to walk, not toward the doors, but away from them, back along the cliff’s edge, down to the shore line and into the dark depths of the Black Pool itself; leaving no ripples in the water. There is no call for me to follow, no command.
But the pull is there, steady and sure.
And suddenly, the mountain no longer feels like a threshold. It feels like a test.
I let my hand fall from the stone.
And I follow.
Image Credit (Above): The Lord of the Rings Online (TM), Mines of Moria (TM), Codemasters, Standing Stone Games, WB
[Continues in "The Grey Descent" found here]
