[Elora]

Vanwe brushed small shavings of wood away so that they could no longer obscure what lay beneath. The afternoon light was crisp and constant, excellent conditions in which to do this sort of finer work. Her belt knife became a precise implement in her slender hands as she worked on. She was absorbed in the carving, in what the wood spoke to her off through her hands.

Her dress and hair had long since dried in the warmth of the afternoon, but aside from pinning down the dress with a smooth stone from the stream bank, Vanwe had paid it no further heed. Her mind was filled with vision of a flight of crane, elegantly stretched across the southern sky, wings spread and effortlessly soaring. She well recalled her first sight of the bird upon her arrival in Gondor.

She remembered the grey eyed men and women too. She gazed analytically at the wood in her hand. The work on the feathers was not as fine as she would have hoped, and she still needed to refine the graceful sweep of the crane's neck and long legs. Yet what she saw cradled in her hand brought a smile to her face. She hoped grey-eyed Derufin would also find it pleasing.

Vanwe pulled her cloak back into position from where it had slipped. Properly wrapped once more, she set her knife back to work to remove the final impediments to the beauty of the creature she remembered soaring on wing into the dusk one evening. She was not far from finished, which was well, as so too was the afternoon coming to a close. She had promised to return on time, and she would not disappoint. Her knife moved in a serious of finely controlled passes, tracing along the grain of the rosewood as if in caress such was the light touch of Vanwe's carving.

An angle to adjust here, another layer to remove there so that the beauty of the wood's grain could be revealed, and she would be done. All in time to return to the inn, clean up the figure she was working on and hopefully settle things with Silvanis, as best a dispossessed daughter of a wanted criminal adrift in the world could.

If only people remembered her father better than they did her mother, for he was not so perilous. A slight sigh drifted from her lips and then once more an expression of pure concentration centred on her carving took up residence upon Vanwe's face once more.