Forochel

I feed wood into the fire, hunched deep in my cloak, face obscured. He hulks beside me. Returned to our seperate islands, there are no words now.

The firelight flickers and shapes change around us.

The shape of things can change in a flicker. In the moment of a few breaths a man could lay aside that he is stone, a women remember that she could dance.

((With thanks to Elendraen for writing the first part, as well as Kirsti for coming up with the idea in the first place and Miji,

Amlarad instructs me – 'dig deeper'.

There is a presence in the air since he pulled me from my snowbound tomb. I catch him looking at me sidelong with his steady grey eyes, as though trying to unravel a story. Then I am compelled to look at him, and he shifts quickly away, busying himself with bow or knife or wood.

And it seemed to me that I lay on the edge of an ice-sea, entombed in foam, solid and crystalline. Above me, held in icy abeyance, the waves frozen in the act of breaking. Far above, the night-sky's stars held fixed in their courses, glittering like spray caught in moonlight.
 
And a ship sailed over the unyeilding sea, and and a voice moved over the waters.
 
'Echuio, Elwing ... Echuio!'
 
And the command fed my spirit, and it burst into flame in the chilled space of me.

sleep... forget... and be at peace...

The storm-voice seeps its hypnotic words into my ears. Beneath its snow-blanket I feel - nothing. My fingers and toes, feet, hands are lost to me. I am a disembodied dream, a flickering thought in a forgotten fleshy shell.

I wake just after dawn to a clear sky. The weather has held good since he left yesterday. I busy myself, using precious thread to mend a rent in my shirt. As I sew I glance up from time to time expecting to see Amlarad walking to the fire, some white-furred creature in his grasp, its paws and small ears already beginning to freeze as the warmth seeps from it.

As morning becomes afternoon, he does not come.