Gondor

“Find him. Find him, and pull out what we want to know. For Gondor, Amenadil.” 
“Understood, ma’am.” 
 
Those were the last words they shared before his departure. 
 
 

(Please note, Braegnir is not the point-of-view character. This story is told from an outside perspective regarding an event involving Braegnir.)

Two young men stand alone in a rather stately home in Pelargir looking up at a brand new painting hanging on the wall. It has been many months now since corsairs took over the city, but with the help of the citizens, it was not long before the port city had been reconstructed.

"Where will you go, brother," the younger of the two questioned. He was thin as a post compared to his muscle-bound brother, though he carried himself with double the confidence and was a few inches taller than his elder.

Peace, calm, stillness. Three words that had been removed from Isulril's vocabulary for the past month at the very least. The past few weeks had been a whirlwind of activity for her. She had seen so many changes that it had been difficult to keep up. Life was changing, and she was changing too.

The feeling of wishing to run had come to a crescendo for the woman. She had considered leaving everything, leaving Bree altogether, returning to Gondor as a disgrace. The disgrace that she knew in her heart that she was. But she had remained.

"I love you." It was simple enough yet complicated to say, and so when it came from Isulril's mouth, she found herself shocked. "I love you," she had insisted.

She remembered the day as though it were yesterday, when her lord had come to the apartments he had kept for her, when he was sitting in his study there, looking through some documents. He had looked up at her, apparently somewhat stunned by the admission.

Standing by the fire, the pale woman was clad only in her chemise, her feet bare, long black locks falling to her waist. She looked into the embers, and thought of the previous evening, standing by the fire in the common room of the Prancing Pony.

She knew nothing of suffering. She was excessively rich, for a woman of Bree. She dressed too lavishly. She relied too much on her moods and was bad at hiding them. She should live on the streets with the working women, selling herself for coin.

All of these thoughts came to her in the days following the events of the previous days. They were not originally her own thoughts, but rather, things that had been said to and of her over the past week, and even before that. Flashes of what had happened over those days came to her, and she clenched the fist of her uninjured hand.

The crowd clapped uproariously. Usually the approbation of the crowd was more subtle, dimmed down by the soft sounds of the harp. But tonight, at the Harpers Court, the harpists were not there at all. Instead, it was a band of merry fiddle players, playing the score for a small opera, which was performed by a few women in rather profuse costume makeup, as well as some gentlemen in excessive robes.

Gondor. How it loomed in the distance. She frantically took step after step away from it, but somehow each step seemed to take her closer to her homeland.
It was not that she hated her homeland. Nay, it was quite the opposite for her. However, now, Gondor simply was associated, to her, with danger itself.