The traveler sat silently in the pitch darkness for some time, bony torso freed from its usual patched tunic and heavy hood, leaned against the splintered back of a rickety chair, spindly legs stretched out before him. He smelt of caked sweat and smoking-weed, but the ramshackle inn standing on the eastern border of Bree-land offered no washing amenities, and he minded little the lack of comfort.
The girl slept soundly on the grungy straw bed before him, the soft sounds of her exhalations filling the spaces between the noisy scurryings of mice outside the creaky door. The sun would not begin its ascent for a few hours yet.
Though he was content to leave the lands surrounding Bree-hill at last, the man did not relish the responsibility of guiding and protecting the naive slumberer across the precarious stretch of lands leading out of Eriador. It was not a task he wished for, but one thrust upon him because he had inadvertently gained a companion that he cared for. The deference given to her brought them here, at the edge of civilization. A single night to be spent one last time with warmth and shelter, before walking headlong into wastelands and peril.
For her, he had stolen a horse that wandered too far from its rightful owner’s notice and pilfered a few meager supplies and tools from the barns and sheds of the farm-lands. The coin which paid for the room they rested in, though, came not from his efforts but gotten by the girl from the same man who had given her fine gifts before, when she went to bid him farewell. The traveler loathed that she did so but had no right to bar her from it, so he waited dutifully by the road for her to return.
He ran a grimy hand through his dingy hair, frustrated at his musings. And even more agitated that his mind and heart seemed to be at odds with how to define the troubling aspects of this companionship.
He forced his focus back to more accustomed thoughts: old memories of another woman he once was completely sure of. When she was yet alive, and so was he.
