((neatly penned in Lumi-kieli))
Now there is nothing to do but wait and cry. I do not know how long it will take before the elleth, Hravanis I think was her name, will know if the curse could be removed by the pools of the Broo-nin, whatever that is. And more than that, I do not even know if I want it to work.
I fear I have made a fool of myself in front of the Elves and also Beri and even Frimsi and later Linglorel too. I do not know why I bother to have ideas and feelings about things I know nothing about. I am no henkipuhuja or noaidi, nor have I been ever taught anything but the basics that every one of my people learns about the spirits. I have no talent to play the goavddis, or enter a trance, or hear the voice of the spirits in wind or water or ice or air, or to speak to them and expect them to hear me. So why then do I imagine I know anything about spirits, or meaning, or omens, or fate, or indeed anything?
When that Elf whose name I never learned gave me these two Elf-stones, he said only that they reminded him of my homeland for they look like ice. I thought little about it for a moon, thinking them only a strange tip. Until they were later identified as Elf-stones of the First Age, though very minor ones, with a very small enchantment upon them, of limited value as seen by the Elves: each of them has an affinity to find the other if they are separated.
And that is where my foolishness begins, because I thought of how perfect a fit their affinity for one another was for what I imagined, hoped, dreamed, wished was mine and Beri's for one another. And therefore, that the spirits had arranged the stones to come to me, just at that moment when I was trying to think of what to get for Beri for a betrothal gift, befitting the customs of both Bree-väki and her people. Surely, I thought, this was fated. It was a sign that I had found the right person, that we were meant to be together as surely as that these stones were. It seemed too great a coincidence otherwise. And thus, having been given everything I needed for what one could imagine as a ritual, it was my clear path to complete it and thus make that connection of fate a certainty.
And then everything since has been as strong a sign against my hopes, as that one moment had seemed a strong sign for them. It took almost two moons just to find someone who could, and would, do the work; Aellwenn was avoiding me at the time (and I saw her at Imladris tonight and it seems she still is), other people I knew either did not know any jewelers or the ones they did were unavailable, and when I finally did find someone, he turned out to be a thief, a dealer in shoddy and counterfeit goods, about whom just about everyone has warned me. Thus far, for reasons I cannot guess, Frimsi has seemed determined to do right by us on this one particular commission, though perhaps that simply means he is doing so good a job at tricking me that neither Beri nor I can see through his schemes. And then the Dwarf he arranged to do the work foolishly got the necklaces stolen, and then, if that was not enough to convince anyone that this entire enterprise was cursed and my own hopes of it being a sign of the rightness of my love for Beri were a fool's dream, the necklaces were retrieved with an actual curse on them.
And what did that curse do? It made Beri forget me. The necklaces I imagined were meant to bring us together, symbolically or perhaps literally, were doing the exact opposite of what I intended.
In the Hall of Fire tonight, when many Elves were gathered, there were several who were very kind, and understanding, and determined to help us, and not even charge us for their work. In fact, one of them gave me a scrap of fabric full of gold coins for no reason I can tell. And yet they were murmuring about us, and about Frimsi. And that is just what I could make out; half the time they spoke their vanha-kieli and I could not tell what they were saying as they looked at me, and later at Beri. And quite a few of them, led at first by one called Silwë but later also by Linglorel who I know from the Pony, said that the stones should just be melted down and destroyed and replaced. I thought at first this came from some misunderstanding, thinking the curse was ancient, and native to the stones themselves, not a spell cast by a mere rauta-väki mânaja within the past two moons, and probably bound to the necklaces more than the stones within them. And they were very dismissive of the value; to them, this is minor craftsmanship that one might do on an idle afternoon and melt down that evening, even the making of the stones themselves; not, as they are to me, the value of most of the work I have earned pennies for in my life, combined with an unfathomably rare and impossible gift that represented so unlikely a coincidence that it must have great meaning concerning my very fate. But they persisted, saying that a curse was more trouble than it was worth to cleanse, if it were even possible to remove it.
And the more they did, and especially when Beri also dismissed the idea that the necklaces had any meaning, symbolic or literal (or when she thought this was actually about me worrying about her time going off into the woods), the more I thought perhaps all of this was foolishness. Maybe they never meant anything. Maybe they were just a strange gift, and I read too much into the timing of their arrival. After all, had I gotten a gift like this two moons earlier would I have been just as convinced it was a sign that Godwin was my fated love?
Or do I now doubt that there is any meaning at all in these stones and necklaces because, if there is, that meaning seems now to be the opposite of what I want? Everything that has happened since the day I first learned of their origin has been just as great a bad omen as getting them seemed at first a good omen. If I continue to believe the spirits are acting, that they even notice someone as unimportant as me, then surely they are telling me, over and over, that I am wrong, that this is not meant to be. And maybe I would rather believe it means nothing than consider that it could mean that.
Beri promises me that we need no stones, that the stones were not what brought us together, that all my thoughts about this are stupid and foolish. And she has no worries. At most she is concerned about my tears. I slipped away from the bed we share because I cannot sleep, while meanwhile she sleeps like a bear in winter, and I went out to sit in this little haven high on the hill, but even the haunting songs of the Elves under the stars bring no peace to my heart. What shall I hope for? That the necklaces be cleansed, and then I can try to convince myself that this means something it probably does not mean -- that our love is indeed fated but that we must persevere through trials, maybe? And persist in my folly? Or shall I hope that they not be cleansed, and we can melt them down and forget all about the whole thing and put all this behind us, and I can convince myself that there was never any significance, and that I was a fool to ascribe so much meaning to happenstance? It seems to me that both of these outcomes will leave me where I am now: crying somewhere alone, because no one else understands why I am even crying.
Either the spirits move fate to bring me to where I should be, or they do not. If they do, and they expect me to read the signs and take the right actions, then they expect too much of me. I have not the wisdom. Leave me in peace, spirits. Your attentions are wasted on me.
