FOROCHEL FEVER
A tale of a woman called Ynel, who once ventured to the frozen lands.
The following is a caption of the story consisting of 7 parts, which are as following:
1. Prologue
2. Dwarves, Angmarim & alliances
3. Letter with conclusions
4. Painful search
5. Fish-tales
6. Strangers in the night
7. Closure
You are now reading...
PART 4: Painful Search
Assured about the existanse of the legendary treasure, the Palantiri, Ynel began her search for them. Accopanied by the ranger Faerollas, she travelled across the wide, icy shores of Forochel and establihed a solid camp in a place known as Vesi-paista. From there she ventured on into the wilderness, looking for signs and hints of the location where to dig, or the spot in the bay where to dive, and Faerollas followed her. The winds chase all around them, the yellow moon waxed and waned again, as nights rolled past. The sea becomed cold-black every night, but the shores were always anew. They are not even real shores, they were skerries, reefs, forgotten streaks of solid ice that perhaps even sank under water before daybreak and rose over the surface again during the night. One can’t know.
Ynel visited them all, searching, hauntedly, for a way to get into the sea, or to get even one step closer to her treasure that may lie in the bottom of the ocean. Her thoughts glided along with the wind, without memories or dreams, they were like grey wandering waves that didn’t even want to reach the horizon. Ynel stopped trying to talk to Faerollas. She stared seaward with glassy eyes, taking the color of the sky asshe tried to follow the lights to their source. Once, as they passed over the frosty pasture a hundred time, Ynel fletingly thought: “I wonder if I’m starting to resemble a ghost.”
Gradually she became bolder and bolder. She began to test the sea, stepping over the waterline where the water looked shallow, looking for ways to walk into the sea. But the sea bit her, hard and ruthlessly like a vexed watchdog. It didn’t let her in.
Then one night Ynel spotted an island just off the shore that was not made of snow or ice, but of solid rock that showed a way off the coast and into the sea. The rock was just a smooth seal’s back, but Ynel climbed on it, and walked to it’s point to look for ways to get even further. She came to the place where the rock fell away toward the black water. She could hear the sound of the water splashing at the bottom of the cliff, but she didn’t stop. She reached over in hopes to see a shallow pathway in the water and…SPLASH! There she was, shuffling up and down, gasping in the water and staring wide-eyedly at the sky above her,untill the pull of the water swallowed her under.
The sea was strange and uneasy, full of weird whispers and cries. She could hear the icebergs turn themselves over. It was a strange, hard sound, and as Ynel tried to climb up from beneath she was sure she could feel the cliff moving under her palms, letting her slip. She could feel the waters heave around her, like someone breathing in the ground beneath. This all she recorded in the eternity of a heartbeat that she spent in the cold, tight grasp of the Northern sea, and then she was jerked up from the waves by the helping hands of Faerollas.
What happened after that, Ynel had no memory off. She had fallen to a frozen state that kept her in it’s grasp for days, and when the cold finally began to let her, a terrible fever followed. Her life for a week on was made of pains, dreams and visions. Ynel thought that the picture of the sea had changed somehow. The real sea wasn’t as blue as that, and the moon was a little overdone. The lights in the sky took shape of humanoid form. They flew over her, taunted her and beckoned to her, and she followed them. She knew too, that they would not let her ever reach them, and yet she had to chase them across the frozen land. She heard them laughing, and as they got farther and farther away, the sound of their laughter seemed to be nothing more than the wind sweeping gently over the snow. She was left with nothing but her urge to find them. She didn’t feel, she didn’t think, - she could only seek. But then lights appeared ahead of her, like candles on the windows of a hut. The frozen glades had disappeared and there were no spirits any longer. She looked at a dwarves that peered at her, their eyes shining sharply from dark wrinkled faces camouflaged with thick hair, as dwarves tend to be. She had only muttered something and gone out again, and the dwarves had tended to her untill the fever had passed and she was hale to live again.
When she came back among te living, Faerollas was gone. She did not stop to think where or why for it seemed of little importanse. Llikely he had left for his mission, or ran away from the Forochel Winter.
She now lived her camp alone. For a time she fished from the water’s edge, and traded her catch against supplies with the dwarves of Zigilgund, untill one day she did not find her friends there anymore. She knew that they too were fleeing from the dreadful coldness, and there was nothing she could do about it. But what did it matter, anyway? She had remained, and felt tremendously proud!
Many nights she sat on the flat stone by the waterfront and looked to the sky and made markings to her maps, trying to figure out where the glowing lights came from, and where was their source. From what corner of the bay could they cast from, or were they from the bay at all? Wherewere the Palantiri, and how could she get to them? She had no idea what to do because it seemed that everything that could be done had been done.
Ynel sat on the beach and watched the sea swell. As a matter of fact, she had started to think in a wholly new manner. It was so marvelous not to have to care about a blessed thing. Nothing else but her goal that laid ahead. Only the mystery and unfathomable vastness of the sea and the sky flooding over her that could never disappoint her. As she gazed at the sky, the evening light crept up above, lighting up the white shores around. They seemed to be alive and shining.
No, she would not leave. She was not done yet.
