Found:
Profound regret.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It should never have happened this way. It should never have ended like this. Why you? Why now?
We made it to Moria. We made it to the doors, to the dwarves. We turned back. There was no point in going in. We wouldn't have come out with anything, no matter how much help we may have given inside. We should have gone anyway. Maybe if we had...
We turned back the way we had come. That was my decision. It was the wrong one. So very wrong. I'm sorry, so sorry...
Bane of my existence. Bloody boggy mud. Always trying to steal my shoes. It managed this time. Hah! It stole so much more.
I don't know what it was. I don't know if it had been watching us since our arrival, just biding its damnable time, if we were just unlucky, or if my getting my foot stuck in the mud is what alerted it. I only know that it came for us, rising out of the water like an angry Balrog. We ran. We weren't fast enough.
It got me first, tearing me out of his arms like a psychotic lover. It dragged me away. Yarassi...
Oh, Yarassi. Why did you stop to save me? Why didn't you just run? I'd have understood! I'd have understood and you'd still be...
I don't know exactly what happened. The bastarding thing threw me into the rock face. Literally. It dragged me into the air, pulled me back and then launched me at the wall. The next thing I knew, it was late evening and all was still and silent again.
There was pain when I awoke. A lot of pain. I'm bruised and bloody all over, my arm is broken and my boot missing, but it's nothing in comparison.
He lay there next to me, like he had on so many other nights. But this time he was cold, unyielding and barely recognisable. Covered in blood, broken and mangled, an arm ripped clean from the socket. His eyes, those sparkling eyes so full of mirth and mischief were open still, staring at the sky. Flat now. Empty.
Oh, what did it do to him? Did he suffer for long?
It didn't matter that I hurt. He'd tried to save me. He died saving my worthless hide! I couldn't leave him like that, alone and broken, on display, an open invitation for any local predator to feast. I just couldn't.
I splinted my arm with a few of his fallen arrows. I dragged him away, away from the lake side, away through the canyon and back to the light. I found a tree atop a wide plateau, surrounded by grass and with my one good arm I dug as deep a grave as I could manage. It took all night and long into the next morning to complete his cairn, but it's done now. He's laid to rest where the sun can warm his face, where the trees can whisper tales to his ears and where the birds fly so freely above. He won't hurt any longer.
I took from him what he wouldn't need. Some gold from his pocket and a ring upon a chain from around his neck. I don't know what significance it held for we never really spoke upon personal matters. I don't know who I should give it to or where they may be, so for now I wear it on my thumb. It fits there.
I told him the truth before I left. I told him the only thing he needed to know and then I continued along the path to my own destruction.
"It should have been me."
