[piosenniel]

Child of the 7th Age’s post


Elanor got up from the lunch table and began to clear off the dishes, waving goodbye to her father and Eli as they trudged back towards the fields. Her mother was so busy with the farm and household chores that she had asked her to keep an eye on her younger brother. Elanor had gone out to the garden to pick a bucket of beans for dinner. By the time she returned to the house, her brother Eric was nowhere to be seen. She was only mildly concerned that he was missing from the house. He was probably off with mother in the garden or out in the barn playing with the cat who’d just had a litter of kittens.

Elanor sat down to finish hemming the dress, a task that her mother had asked her to start the evening before. She held up the skirt against the sunlight which was streaming in through the window and took a close look at her line of stitches. She still could not match her mother’s skill with the needle. Some of her own stitches were long, others quite short and a little wiggly. She’d need to work on that some other time. For right now, this would have to do.

Elanor was determined to finish her chores so she could meet her cousin Elian Whitfield and perhaps one of his friends as they had agreed the day before. They planned to hike north about a mile or two to see if there was anything new or different to report now that the Dwarves had carts of ore heading to the west. Rumor had it that the Dwarves had again started doing business with the Elves who dwelled deep within Mirkwood. Elanor had no idea if this was true but she wanted to get a good look at those carts and the Dwarves who were driving them. Someday, she promised, she’d take a great trip all the way to the Lonely Mountain where the Dwarf folk were said to live, with all their grand halls and piles of gold and other rare ores. But, for now, a little hike a mile or so north was all that she could manage. Elanor threw the dress down in a crumpled pile on the table and slipped out the front door, running down the pathway in the direction of their agreed upon meeting point.

*******************


The two teen-agers had trudged along for a half hour or so heading steadily north. Elian told Elanor stories he had heard from his grandfather: how the Dwarves had returned to the mountain some two hundred years before and had dug deep into the tunnels and come up with amazing treasure. Elanor wondered what the treasure would look like. She imagined heaps of gold and mithril sitting in three of four large piles in the middle of the Dwarves’ Great Hall. It might be nice, she reflected, to have a pin or necklace to wear. The two stopped and sat under an overhanging beech tree, drinking from the water bottles they had brought with them. Despite all their hiking, they had not seen a single Dwarf or any carts laden with treasure.

“We’d best get back,” Elanor pressed. “Mother expects me to help with dinner.”

“But we didn’t see any Dwarves!” her cousin objected. “And that’s why we came.”

”Maybe so. But we can always come again any time we want.”

Just as they were about to head south, Elian got up and excitedly pointed towards the hills in front of them. Some distance away and barely visible, there seemed to be a whole herd of Dwarves running to the west as fast as their short legs could take them. Some of them were waving swords, staves, and axes in the air.

“By all Beruthiel’s cats, what’s happening over there?”

Before Elanor could open her mouth to venture an opinion, there was a terrible hissing and whirling noise that came from the air. Instinctively, Elian grabbed for his cousin’s hand and yanked her down into the tall grass and ferns so that they were totally hidden. Coming straight at them, a sinister, twisting figure made its way southward, flying through the air. The creature was gigantic, its color just as golden as all the piles of treasure that Elanor had envisioned in the tales that she'd heard. Elian could glimpse two long fingers of flame that seemed to shoot out from the wyrm’s gaping mouth, leaving trails of ashes and smoke behind. The two children huddled together under the bracken afraid to look up or show their heads above the foliage. When the terrible shadow had finally swept over them, they staggered abruptly to their feet. Elian was shaking and Elanor barely holding back tears. “Our families!” they both cried at once. With that the two friends took off running towards the south.