Here There Be Dragons - RPG

[Child of the 7th Age]

Aewindil nodded and shrugged his shoulders, mumbling a few words of reassurance that he had no intention of trying to wander off from camp. The istar wondered if Rôg would show the same good sense, but kept his doubts to himself. Out of the corner of his eye, the old man caught a glimpse of an overturned incense pot whose glowing cinders were just beginning to spill out over the mat. With all the excitement of the past few minutes, and the dark shadows that flickered and played along the walls of the tent, no one else had yet noticed that the pot had overturned.

Searching for an excuse to turn away and look at things more closely, Aiwendil hastily bent down to retrieve his leather pouch that he'd set on the floor shortly after he'd finished working with Ayar. He ran his eyes along the ground, noting that a tiny sheet of flame had already escaped from the pot of incense and was beginning to run silently along the mat of woven grass in the direction of Ayar's bed. For a moment Aiwendil did not react. He frequently had difficulties coping with the vagaries of life in Middle-earth and could not comprehend that something like this could be happening in the middle of someone's tent, especially when he was surrounded by a contingent of armed Men.

As realization set in, Aiwendil excitedly blurted out a warning in Quenyan, which no one in the room could understand, and lunged for the broom that the servant girl had left leaning against the chest where Ayar normally stored the family's clothes and linens. Seizing the broom and raising it high above his head, the istar brought it down authoritatively several times in a series of grand thumps, hoping to smother the flames and keep them from spreading. Unfortunately, the only thing he accomplished was to fan the blaze still further. The small leaping tendrils of fire caught hold of the old straw broom and began to shoot up even higher.