[piosenniel]

Elora's post - Naiore

The afternoon shadows grew lush and long, reaching further a field as the Sun made her way into the West. Naiore watched the darkness stretch and grow around her with pleasure. With the night would come other things and she had been waiting long and driven for. She remained still and at relative ease in the embrace of a shadow cast by the ancient bole of a fig tree. It loomed massive over her, surrounded by the adjoining woods that carpeted the land around the inn she was watching.

Some may account it a pleasant place. For Naiore, it was a land of failure and frustration, a wretched place and she had little love for the tree or anything else that lived within its bounds. She was difficult to see, enfolded as she was in twilight darkness. Her inky leathers bore the stains of hard travel. Mud daubed her boots, all but obscuring the delicate silver stitching tracing vine tendrils up her boots. Her hair was no longer smoothly braided. Unearthly golden wisps escaped to graze her cheek on the lifting breeze of a midsummer afternoon. Her state and presence gave rise to a great many questions, the answers to which Naiore did not greatly care to entertain as she cast a simmering glance towards the Forsaken Inn.

Rangers, cursed scions of Numenor, had pushed her hard through the wilderness. She had managed to elude them, her skills tested as they had not been in the past 12 years. Still, although she was for the moment safe, she was far from pleased. It grated to be sitting beneath a shedding tree encrusted with mud. She should, right at this moment, be running in free abandon further to the north. She should, as she sat in darkness gathering her wits and thoughts, be bringing a new tide and era to a land that had escaped the harsher ravages of war. She should, by all rights, be at the pinnacle of power, all the might of Mordor at her back.

Naiore flicked a braid back over her shoulder, its golden weight added to the other seven that hung long to her waist. Instead, she had been cheated of all that should have been hers, even the small prize of the Shire. Rangers and her own people conspired to hem her in and bring her down like an animal. They would take her, bound hand and foot, to face justice as the ignorant liked to call it. There was no justice in this world. There was no love either. No softness, no compassion, certainly no valour or glorious. Those who sought it were fools, nothing more. If anything, two ages spent in the turmoil of Middle-earth had taught her that. The much vaunted values of her kin and the infant cultures that clambered noisy and brash at its feet were lies. They deluded themselves. There was only death, fear, pain, woe, suffering and one other thing. Revenge. That was all.

She who saw the truth and in doing so mastered both it and the world around her, she who had held such power in countless lands, mastered terror and was mistress of the hounds of war and hell, sat in a cold wood. Even had she tried for the Havens to seek release from these mortal lands, she could not penetrate the bristling ring set in place by Elessar around the Shire. His name curdled in her mouth. Twelve years spent running from a beggar king of mortal descent to come to this!

Naiore raised starlit grey eyes to the darkening sky. In them was the long tale of her years. A sadness so heavy it could suffocate her was allowed to surface for air as she glanced at the sky. Then cold anger and revenge settled in and pushed the tiredness away. She looked at the inn, considering it once more. Her face was impassive, as often it was, carved elven beauty remarkable even amongst her own kin. Her face had beheld horror untold, she had wrought it with her own hands, for reasons few could understand. Now she sat waiting for an incipient snare to spring, dirty and desperate but not without her pride. She wore that like armour. It had gotten her through before this day.

The Inn was glowing with firelight in the early evening. Her gaze shifted to the stables, where it was said her daughter worked. Naiore could see no sign of Vanwe just yet, but her sources were adamant. They well knew the price their lies would earn them. It was a difficult death at the hands of a Ravennor. Naiore’s reputation was not conferred to her without merit.
Somewhere was a Ranger too, one she knew. She had expected to find Kaldir skulking in the forest. Such acts were not beneath him as they were her. The presence of both Kaldir and Vanwe was not a coincidence that could be ignored. She should have killed the whelp when she was born, unwanted by-blow that Vanwe was. The idea that some long buried maternal instinct prevented her was laughable. Only the perilous consequences of a lack of restraint keep her silent. Rangers were about, though not as thickly here as they were further West.

Vanwe should be well south, in the desolate Haradwaithe, kept with the goats and the barbarians Naiore had left her with. The fact that she was not had left and survived the journey north and eluded capture told Naiore much. The fact that Vanwe was known to be tracing her told her more. She would be a woman now, grown and no longer a helpless babe. There was no telling the danger she was. Perhaps, Naiore thought, she could use Kaldir to put an end to Vanwe and her threat. She could see to Kaldir after that.

But the fallen Ranger would need to be pushed, if only to see past his immediate mercenary loss in Vanwe's death. It remained to be seen if she could achieve that. He had proved difficult to break, those years ago. Kaldir was a rare challenge, one she had enjoyed then as she soon hoped to.

Naiore waited out the twilight. Travelers were still straggling in to the inn. Vanwe would appear. She worked in the stables, assisting a man who was no real threat for the likes of Naiore. Kill Vanwe and Kaldir, attempt again to push north without a tail, and see if bloodshed could not find the Shire after all. She was without any other purpose, and she would pursue this with a breathtakingly singular will that proved stronger than steel.

The Free Peoples could not hope to contend with her. Sauron himself had never truly conquered all of her heart and soul. Menecin neither. In the face of all she had endured and perpetrated throughout the wars of the Second and Third Age, rising time and again, ceaselessly vigilant in her quest for knowledge that had consumed her life, achieving the death of her daughter and Kaldir was nothing but a light aside.

Perhaps, Naiore mollified herself, one of them held what she looked for. Perhaps they could tell her from where fear spawned. It was unlikely, but possible. She held to that, for it made the ignominy of her failure in recent months to reach the Shire, her fugitive life since Sauron's fall lesser. How they would have laughed to see her reduced to such a state provided they escaped her with the facility to laugh intact within their bodies and souls. She could endure a rough night and hard travel if it meant the achievement of all she had endured and suffered for.

Whilst her riddle of fear circled in her head, Naiore watched from the trees. She needed but the slightest opportunity to begin, and she had tired of idle waiting and ceaseless flight. In the depth of night, she would strike. Snare Vanwe, lead her away and draw Kaldir after her… and then when both were dead and no longer able to scheme against her, she would no longer have the inconvenience of a bounty hunter to hamper her north ward’s push. The lanterns of the stars began to spring into life as Naiore maintained her watch on inn, pondering who had found sent Vanwe north. Elrond’s son’s mayhap? Celeborn? A contemptuous smile curved her lips as she pondered her kinswoman’s husband. Yes, Celeborn of Doriath would do just such a thing. She would see to it that much ruin came of his impertinence.