[piosenniel]

Pio's post:

‘I’ve found it,’ Rôg had told the captain. ‘Hidden in plain sight as it were!’ He chuckled, then, seeing the frown on Luindal’s face, went on. ‘As far as I can tell it’s intact, but the years and the waters have left their protective cloak over it.’

‘And . . .?’ prompted the Elf.

‘And why don’t you come see it yourself,’ Rôg continued. Luindal eased himself into the water from the longboat. The shapechanger offered him a flipper to hang on to, and off they went.

It was not far below the surface where the palantir lay. But time and tides had nested other smaller rocks about it, and coated it with a fine layer of sediment, making it look irregular in shape. Limpets and barnacles had attached themselves along the upper surface. Rôg supposed that even when the tide was out and a small section of the scaly top of the globe exposed, it would not be recognizable as something as grandly crafted as a palantir.

Luindal dove down to the base of the globe with Rôg. In his explorations, the shapechanger had poked and prodded at the small rocks along the sloping edge of the bay leading down from the sandbar. When he’d worried several of the small rocks in the place, they had jarred loose a layer of encrustation from the globe, allowing him a glimpse of the smooth surface beneath. A crystalline shimmer, even in the dim light of these northern waters, made him pause and inspect further. Luindal grinned when his friend showed him the surface that lay beneath the ‘rock’ and motioned for them to surface.

In a pre-arranged signal, Luindal called the ship near to where the palantir lay. The longboats had already come near with their cargo of nets and ropes. Taking a stout pike in his hands, the captain and Rôg dove down again to begin clearing the smaller stones from the far side of the palantir’s base. Luindal resurfaced a number of times for air, and finally for the large net. He wedged the bottom edge of the net as far as he could beneath the globe, Rôg helping as best he could using his teeth. The pair resurfaced to get the ropes with their stout hooks tied on and dove down again to attach them to the net. The ropes had rings on their opposite ends which were slid over a stout, thick iron hook from the windlass used to haul up the anchor. They were pulled taut as several Elves put their muscle to the handles of the horizontal cylinder and pushed it slowly round. It was a hard haul at first, as the globe was dislodged from its sedimentary base; but it broke free at last and was pulled quickly toward the ship and then upwards, secure in the net, to the deck.

Numerous hands reached out to help it swing gently over the railing and lower it down gently to the nest of canvas prepared for it. Luindal and Rôg had come quickly back to the ship as the globe was maneuvered through the waters and watched as it was finally levered safely onto the deck. ‘Put some chock’s about the base,’ Luindal called out. ‘So that it doesn’t move. and let’s get the other net over it and secured down to the railings so that it won’t pitch overboard should the sea turn rough on our journey back to the Havens.’

Satisfied that the precious cargo was safe, Luindal asked that Rôg continue his search for the smaller of the seeing stones. ‘I’ll give it my best,’ the shapechanger said, maneuvering himself to the side of the ship. ‘But given how the big one looked, I’m not sure I’ll recognize the smaller at all.’ He leveraged himself over the side of the Spirit and dove into the water.

The clouds parted for a brief moment; the weak sunlight hit the ship, lightening the spirits of those aboard as it did so. It bathed the stone as it lay on the deck, glinting off the small portion of smooth crystalline surface that had previously been exposed. A reflected ray shot out from the palantir, glittering wildly from within; a brilliant flash, driving away the darkness for a brief moment as the thick dark clouds rolled in once more.

A triumphant signal, it might be said, or perhaps even mocking, seen clearly by the Corsair ship . .



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Regin Hardhammer's post

Marreth had never suspected Lord Castamir to be spying on himself. Had he always been monitoring Marreth, or was this an extra precaution that had been taken to safeguard the Palantiri? Marreth had never been focused on the Stones themselves, because his use for them was limited. He did not have political aspirations, preferring to voyage the sea in search of lute and plunder, rather than hatching schemes inside an office. Vengeance welled deep in his heart against the Gondorians, the murderers of his father, and the personal glory he would gain both mattered much more to him than actually using the Stones. But betrayal, either by Lord Castamir or his agent, made Marreth’s blood boil like the water in his tea kettle. Marreth vowed to seize these powerful weapons and use them against Gondor, because of the anguish he knew it would cause to Castamir, watching his most desired treasure being reaped by another.

His eyes scaned the horizon, and Marreth began to pull his thoughts away from the vile Castamir and focus on the immediate task of securing the Palantiri. Marreth had not succeeded so far, but he realized that his mission must continue, whatever the betrayal Castamir had made, since the thought of allowing the Stones to reach Gondor caused a visceral pain in his stomach.

As he sat weighing yet another tactic to use against the Elves, he saw something sparkling in the dull blue waters. Marreth turned his head and watched in horror as the Elvish ship pulled a large opaque stone from the sea using a winch and nets. Beside the ship, Marreth noticed a seal barking towards one of the Elves on board who then flashing a big grin, which he thought was rather odd. The seal, once on board the smaller ship, changed shape into a man with brown hair and olive skin before Marreth’s very eyes. Marreth had heard of shapechangers before in tales told on his travels, but he had never actually seen one. So that’s how they found it, thought Marreth. Even with the most trained seal, a human would be able to search out the Stones and find them faster than the Corsairs ever would.

After he stopped cursing and kicking furniture, Marreth calmed down enough to realize that if the Elves have found one Stone, the other probably would not be far away. All they had to do was find it, it, attack the Luindal's ship, capture the other Palantiri, and send those on board to a grave on the ocean floor below the wall of ice which would soon cover the water’s surface. Marreth was confident of his victory because, although he could handle the sword deftly, his greatest strength lie on naval warfare, where his ship was swifter than a shark.

With a holler, Marreth blared to the ship’s crew, “Boys, it was a bad bit of luck that the Elves got the first Palantiri, but there’s still another one out there. And we are going to go out and get it before those stinking Elves do. It probably isn’t too far from the spot that they found the first one. After we take the other stone, we will launch an attack on those Elvish vermin so hard that their ship will be shattered into driftwood. Let’s get moving.”