[Lasbelinion]

Uien is ill received

What tenuous feelings of safety and shelter he had felt just short moments ago now fled at the entrance of the other. Anger rode her voice and features. Her fists were clenched as if to punctuate what her words would name. It mattered not the offense, he had learned. Better to stand still and get it over.

In long learned reflex his muscles tightened as he awaited the sure to come blow; his mind shut hard against the expected pain, severing his receipt of it from consciousness. For a space of time there were two beings which stood in his place . . . waiting . . .

The air thickened with her unmouthed accusations. And still the blow did not fall. Taking a quick short breath, Lithmîrë stepped back from her trembling form. A fragment of a question she threw at him settled precariously in his consciousness.

‘What new darkness is this?’ he heard.

Harsh voices rose at the edges of his memory. ‘Thinks his kin will come looking for him.’ The voices of dark men and Orc grated against his ears; their rude laughter assailing him as sharply as the stick with which they beat him. ‘Dark and ugly as we are now to them . . . that’s how you are to your foul kin in their precious forests.’ They’d laughed again as they sent him running back to his fellows in the fields; the lashes of the overseer biting at his back . . .

He struggled up against the ghosts, to see that she was still standing there, unmoving. A small glance to his right showed a break in the bushes between the trees. He registered she had no weapon on her . . . save her mind. It was she that had tried to force her way into his thoughts. Like the others with their sullied ways . . . she was small . . .

From some hidden corner of his awareness rose a stench of revulsion at his thought that he could choose to kill her. And with it some understanding that such an act would indeed be dark and ugly. What faint hope he held for himself would be quenched in such overwhelming shadow.

Lithmîrë shut his mind hard against her. ‘Stay back,’ he warned her in even tones. ‘Look to yourself,’ he rasped, taking another step back, lengthening the distance between them. With a sudden gathering of his cloak about him, he turned quickly to his right and ran; the brutish jeers and laughter of summoned ghosts biting at his back.