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Old 08-26-2009, 03:22 PM   #183
Thinlómien
Shady She-Penguin
 
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: In a far land beyond the Sea
Posts: 8,385
Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.Thinlómien is wading through the Dead Marshes.
Vigdis

They were fighting outside, she knew. She could hear the thundering even to the distant cavern where she was working. Dwarf against goblin, good against evil, defenders of their realm against murderers. Any other day, she should have been there, her beautiful sword and her strong arms, her fierceness and skill protecting Khazad-dûm like so many times before. She was enough of a warrior to have been summoned.

But she had been appointed with a duty even more important than fighting the enemy. Instead of revenging her lord's death she would be making him remembered, she, always a mason over a warrior, was carving his tombstone when they were fighting at the very gates. Ignoring the battles, momentarily forgetting the flickering flame and the echoes in the dark, she was fully concentrating in her craft, pouring her skill and love to the stone.

Memories, how they hurt. The scene in her room at night, the first time ever meeting him, all the days exploring the tunnels of Erebor with him. The memories would go, go to the stone and the stone would keep them, live through them, breath through them. His eyes when he explained his crew he had found a new tunnel closer to the top of the mountain, his laugh when she had suggested asking King Dáin for a special permission to break through a wall, his strong body carrying the heavy blocks of stone in the tunnels with pearls of sweat on his brow. All going to the stone, to the shape, the slight curving of the beautiful dark gray block. And his first speech to the colony in Khazed-dûm, the shadows of worry behind his bright eyes, his fierce swordstrokes in a goblin attack. All of them went to the perfectly, mlikily white slab of stone to be placed on top of the oblong dark rock.

And the last time he had looked at her, his eyes briefly passing over her face and the hint of a smile of recognition when he was leaving for the Mirrormere, never to return. That she kept in mind when she carved:

BALIN FUNDINUL
UZBAD KHAZADDÛMU

which would be read in later times by speakers of the common tongue as

BALIN SON OF FUNDIN
LORD OF MORIA
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