2004 Barrow-Downs’ Birthday Celebration!

[Luthien_ Tinuviel]

The party was almost over, and Luthien still hadn't paid her respects to the Barrow-wight! She had spent most of her time by the food tables, talking to people she knew and some she didn't. But what with great volumes of good food and socialization, she had certainly honored her hobbit tendencies. Now, if she could only make it over to the Party Tree....

Pushing her way through the crowds and deciding to ignore the fact that there seemed to be quite a lot of orcs about, Luthien arrived at the tree, and looked at the ominous hole in the ground, made even more ominous by the half-light. Not wishing to place a spike in the tree, even though she knew it wouldn't really do any harm, Luthien got some tape out of her satchel, and drew forth her poem. She surveyed her work proudly.

Dear Wight, it said, Although this may seem strange,
The Downs is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Much growth it has seen, but is not de-throned,
And keeps the status of greatness that it owns.
Wraiths, all the members, their refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many posts, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the Web we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Winged Balrogs and their chasms out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons - 'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we post still by the law in which we're made.

And now for the gift! Once more dodging orcs, and the mayhem they had caused, Luthien strolled over to the tables covered with mathoms and gifts of all kinds. It really wasn't very far to go at all, but the darkness made it more so. Upon an empty spot on one of the many tables Luthien gently and lovingly placed a dagger. It was one of her favorites, and the Barrow-downs forum was one of her favorite sites. It was only fitting. Luthien fervently hoped that the Wight would find some good use for it, maybe place it in the cold hands of one of his victims. Having given up her knife in offering to the creator of much joy, she quickly turned about and began to search for her friends. Surely they were somewhere in this throng, and she must spend at least some time with them before the party came to a close. She was the one who had made them come in the first place. She lifted her eyes to the sky to gaze upon the glorious fireworks. Their bursts of light would surely help her find her way - wouldn't they?

[Firondoiel]

“Keld!” called Firi when she saw her friend dodging the orcs. She raced to help her through the crowd when there was an explosion in the tent next her. The force of it knocked her to the ground as the stolen firework headed towards the stars and busted into it’s rain of colour. Some of the crowd clapped, others were too drunk to noticed, and others were hurrying to the flaming tent.

Firi shook her head in an attempt to clear the fogginess from it. “Firi?” asked Keld’s voice.

“Hmmm?” replied Firi groggily.

“Are you alright?” asked Elbie from the other side of her.

“Just fine. Should I be otherwise?” asked Firi with a lopsided grin.

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Replied Leo.

Her friends helped her up and they walked back to their tent. The night was wearing into morning and the party would end soon. The group packed up all their things and gave one last look at the party. It had been wonderful to be back with the Downers again and now back to home.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Cami ducked out of the way as tweens, young ones and those pretending to be young took to the game with aim and strong arms....

Oh, never, never, never quoth Cami. Respectable or not, a stout Hobbit can never pass up a water fight. Just witness the scene at Crickhollow. Good aim and a strong arm may lie far beyond an individual Hobbit's skills, but a water fight is truly irresistable......

With a whoop and a holler, Mistress Cami retreated to the side and discreetly "borrowed" one of Saucepan Man's larger containers, filling it up to the brim and making sure that a bit more spilled over the top. For as a former employee of the Shire Post, Cami had a serious bone to pick, and the water fight seemed like a good way to do it.

Turning about, her eyes gleeming bright, she spied exactly the folk she wanted: Fordim, Bethberry, Saucepan Man, and H-I ......those most responsible for filling up her mailbox with 1,346 messages from the canonicity thread to which she had so unwisely subscribed! There were other residents of Arda who also bore some responsibility for this explosion of knowledge, but they did not seem to be anywhere in sight, so this representative group would have to do.

Lifting the pan high above her head, she bellowed out a challenge, "For Middle-earth and the Shire! This is for all the poor Hobbit postmasters who had to deliver those tomes to folk's mailboxes for the past three weeks! It's not enough we have to deal with Farmer Maggot's dogs and the young lads who offer us exploding toffee, now we have mailbags that weight between five and six hundred pounds because of all this ponderous learning! And, I have it on good authority that, even as I party here, the mound of letters in my postbox continues to grow taller."

With that, Cami lowered her arms and sent the water spraying everywhere. If the fireworks tent had managed to stay in one place, she would have repeated this act more than once, just as she had been required to clean out her postal box any number of times to make sure that other important messages could get through to her. But the sight of the tent flying up in the sky was novel enough to give her pause, so she stopped to take a second look.

[Lyta_Underhill]

Lyta stirred out of her profound stupor once an uncharacteristically large percentage of ambient sound filtered into her subconscious, registering a high number of orcs in the area. Sure enough, when she managed to pry one eye open, she beheld a scene that reminded her more of a rainy night party on a Misty Mountain pass than a dignified hobbit-run affair. Not that she minded. She was three sheets to the West Wind and not prone to hangovers.

In the distance, she noticed Cami, who had actually been the one to send the invite (at much trouble to the wilds beyond the Withywindle, I might add, and much appreciated!). She was throwing water at several respectable Barrowdowners, strangely enough, not really affecting their respectability in any way at all, except to render them respectably wet. As Lyta had a need to wash her once-white dress after the long detour, she decided perhaps this was not such a bad thing to join in...summoning the strongest (and least drunk) Took lads around her, she managed to shoulder a good load of honeysuckle wine and venture forward (on a zig-zag path).

Lyta reached the oddly out of place mound and directed the honeysuckle wine to be deposited there. Once she had unburdened herself, she caught a face full of water from she knew not where. It ran down her whitish dress, not really washing it at all. She realized what a mistake had been made, but she also realized she had to find some water quickly. Spying a strange man surrounded by myriad saucepans, she crawled in his general direction, managing to lay hands on one small egg-poaching cup before falling on her face again. Luckily, a missed aim filled her tiny cup with a full dose and she let it fly at what appeared to be an orc wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. Lyta wondered if Treebeard had spiked her wine with something truly unheard of, as she rubbed her eyes and continued to see the same loud tie attached incongruously to a definite orc.

Lyta rose unsteadily and filled her egg-poaching cup full of a draught of wine and raised a toast to the Barrow-wight. May your barrow never flood in the rain and always be well-air conditioned in the summer! Cheers!

Lyta

[piosenniel]

From the edges of a half-dream, Pio could hear an irritating buzz in her left ear.

‘Pio . . . Pio . . .’

All Elvishness aside, the press of the party and its demands had finally caught up with her. It was late night. The children had gone back to the Inn with their nanny. And now sitting at the bar in the Green Dragon pavilion, head resting comfortably in the crook of her arm, she’d hoped to catch a few winks before it was time to see the guests off. Her red wig sat in a tangle by her elbow, and she’d given up on the green eyes – her contacts lying discarded in a dish of ale she’d set out as an enticement for an old friend of hers.

‘No rest for the wicked, you sorry excuse for an Eldar . . .’

Pio raised her head and stared blearily across the bar. ‘That you?’ she croaked, the hours of second-hand pipe-weed making her voice hoarse. The Elf knuckled her eyes and stared toward the dish of ale.

Neek . . . breek . . . came the familiar rasp. And more familiar were the raggedy black antennae waving wildly at her.

Bird!

The neeker-breeker bore a pained look as she buried her head in the remaining ale. ‘None of that Elvish mind-talk,’ she said spluttering and raising her head to fix Pio with a ghastly rictus of a smile. ‘You oscar-mayer me one more time and I swear I’ll flame you from here to the Tower Hills!’

‘The correct term is osanwë, you old dung beetle.’ Pio put her face down close to her chitinous friend. ‘Where have you been?’

‘No time for that,’ returned the neeker-breeker as she leapt to her friend’s shoulder. ‘Things have gotten wild while you were napping. The field’s all muddy from a giant water fight that broke out; those Uruk’s have run amok; and the tent where the fireworks were stored has sprouted wings and flown off.’

~*~

The scene outside the pavilion was as bad as Bird had laid it out to her. Folk were slipping and sliding in the mire as buckets and pots and pans of water flew through the air. ‘Still, they are having fun, are they not?’ chuckled Pio as Cami was thoroughly doused in a concerted effort from Saucy, H-I, and the upstart Balrog. ‘By the One! Is that not Tom’s daughter in the thick of it?’ The neeker-breeker raised her little voice in a rousing cheer for the Hobbit, who’d just scored a bucket on the River-woman’s offspring.

At the far end of the field, she could see the last of the fireworks flare up and sputter out about the area; they too had not entirely avoided the deluge of the water fight. The escaping tent had caught fire it seemed as it shot skyward and ignited the few Rohan candles and shooting stars left from the show. A few of the more inebriated of the guests stood in an unsteady ring about the spluttering display, raising their flagons at the light show as they shouted out their slurry words of acclamation.

A number of the wiser party-goers had gathered up their belongings, empty plates and baking pans, rounded up family and friends, and were heading for the gate. Oro, spying the Elf, waved wildly as she and her friends, Nova and Firi drove their cart toward the exit. Imladris, basket in hand, was following behind them on foot. And there, in a small wagon, were the three musicians who had performed so well . . . Symestreem was playing a traveling song on her fiddler, ‘Over the hills and Far Away’, accompanied by Arestevana on the dulcimer. Weaving in and out of their melody was the sweet, haunting voice of Kitanna. Pio waved at them as they passed, and they nodded to her, not missing a beat.

Kransha, she noted was trying to round up his cousins. ‘Herding cats!’ snickered Bird as she watched the poor Orc’s hapless efforts. Saraphim had joined the effort, having borrowed the whip of flame from the otherwise preoccupied Balrog. Memories of old bubbled up in the Uruk’s small minds as they fled before the hated instrument.

Other partygoers followed, keeping their distance from the whip; their hoods were pulled up and Pio could not make out their faces. Their voices sounded tired, but the tone of their conversation was merry and she smiled, hoping they had indeed had a good time. She thought she heard the voice of Meneltarmacil at one point and the voices of those most interesting denizens of Middle-mirth. And there was Luthien . . . she had found her friends and was now walking home with them.

Aman came out from the pavilion, having gathered up a small group of those she was ferrying back to the Green Dragon. They would spend the night there, then make for their own homes on the morrow. Nerindel held the reins of the Inn’s ponies as the group piled into the haywagon. Nuru and Orual, her hair a strange, streaky shade of red, settled themselves in the loose scattered hay to continue their catching-up. Cami, the children in tow, had her arm wrapped about a rather inebriated Lyta, and with the help of Ithaeliel and Roa was rolling the woman’s nearly inert form onto the wagon bed. Bethberry, Saucy, and H-I, all of them thoroughly wet, had left the field of ‘battle’ and accepted the offer from the Dragon’s Innkeeper of dry clothes and a warm bed for the night. Iadarion, striding along with Evisse, hailed them as they passed, and both climbed on the wagon as it slowed.

Hilde and her Mister walked arm in arm through the gate, their heads close together, laughing at some small shared joke. In like manner came Everdawn with her friend Aredhel, her pink bonnet tied firmly on her head. Dininziliel, too, had roused from her nap, and blinking her eyes in the starlight was picking her way carefully along the muddy path. And there in the shadows walked Witch_Queen and Maeggaladiel, tired by the looks of them, followed by three Hobbits attempting to share one large coat.

Last to pass was Guinevere, deep in conversation with Merisu. Lush, sandwiched between the two, dropped an appropriate comment here and there, punctuated by the occasional nip from her silver flask. The obedient Falafel trotted up at the sight of her mistress and bore the three away into the night.

~*~

Under the bright moon, the empty field took on a ghostly hue. The streamers hung limply from the trees and the candle-lanterns had all guttered out. The barrow that had earlier figured so prominently beneath the Party Tree was now gone; the Wight and his treasures fled back to his Downs until called out again next year. The tree’s trunk was bare; he had taken his accolades and well-wishes with him. All the staff that had made the party run so smoothly had gone home, too . . . tomorrow would be time enough for the final clean-up.

A shadowy form in the northwest corner of the field stepped out between two trees and into a patch of moonlight. The last guest. It drew itself up to a great height, its wings spread out from tree to tree. Swiftly it rose, and with winged speed, passed over the field as a tempest of fire.

Bird, having traded her neeker-breeker form for one human, poked her friend in the ribs at the spectacle. ‘What an exit! The guy knows how to catch your attention, eh?’ Pio nodded and looped her arm through her old friend’s. ‘If we hurry,’ she said, ‘we can catch Cami before she goes to bed. The children will all be sleeping. There’s a bottle of Old Winyards I hid in the cellar. We can sit under the stars and drink to the continued good health of the Wight and his Downs.’

Motioning for Pio to exit the gate ahead of her, Bird made a grand mock bow and tipped an imaginary hat at the Elf, saying, ‘You first, my dear Piosenniel . . .’ ‘No, after you, my dear Birdland . . .’ came the requisite reply from the Elf as she blew out the last candle-lantern.

Then laughing, they left the darkened field, arm in arm . . .