Elvealin

While enjoying the last summers' breeze, watching the stars come out as the sun lazily disembarked from it's high position in the sky, the rustling noises of silk dresses and tunics began to settle. It was a wonderful eve, full of the fresh and warm scents of flowers in their last bloom, the slowly dissipating warmth of the setting sun, and the murmur of excited onlookers.

Dearest diary, reassuringly blank companion! Through how many nights of grief, suffering two fresh arrow-wounds to the fëa, have you consoled me? But I fear nothing has quite prepared either of us for the present fix. 

Sarmëtecil, the secretary-scribe of the Order of the Pillar, had learned a trick lately for dealing with the Lady's recent jumpiness: she knocked on the wall of the hallway before reaching the door of the office. The sound was fainter and, to the keen ears of the Eldar, fairer -- perhaps the wood was lebethron, Sarmë knew not, and she was no harpist, but judged the sound to be lighter and gentler than the sound of knocking on the actual door.

Manadhlaer sighed, not for the first time that day, or that hour. She dipped her quill and made another attempt:

It has been widely known since the Elder Days that the sap of an unopened poppy...

Instantly she stopped and put a line through her words. "If it has been widely known," she said aloud, "why write it at all?" One of her delicate silken slippers, as light as an Elfling's first breath, had already gone. She kicked the other against the far wall of her office and began again.

It was not that, as she removed a stack of hairpins, Manadhlaer thought anything had gone particularly wrong at the Ball. Indeed, at times the dance-floor had been an impenetrable Huorn-forest of bodies through which she simply could not struggle hard enough to reach the other side of the room.