A perilous beauty
Pippin, do you remember the song that the dwarves taught to Bilbo Baggins?
The wind was on the withered heath
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.
The song is not true, my love. There is no wind here. If there was a forest, it has long since languished and died. Here and there I see evidence that trees once grew here, but all that remain now are few twisted and blasted husks, like like burned and gnarled hands trying to claw their way out of the cold, burnt earth. They look like skeletons to my eyes.
There is naught alive here but sere grasses that hiss beneath our feet, and rank, scraggly hedges that seem to be more thorn than leaf. What I would give now to hear a bird, or see a mouse or even a spider.
This is a desolate, forsaken land. If there is anything alive here, what could it possibly know of goodness? How could anything born into such a ruined and disconsolate land know happiness or sweetness, when all that they ever see is desolation? How could they know joy, when they are raised in a ruin?
Legend says that this was the breeding ground of the great dragons of old. Pippin, my dear, now that I see this land, I begin to understand why everyone thought I was mad to come here. Dragons must have no love in them at all to have chosen to bear their young in such a place as this. What mother would chose such a thing? Yet who am I to judge them, for am I not also a mother, and have I not left my own child in order to fulfill a foolish promise? Perhaps I should not be so quick to judge them.
We have reached our appointed destination. We left the cart in the middle of a field of dessicated and broken grasses. My companions and I, and of course Plum, for I will not leave the pony out to the mercy of the dragon, are watching from behind a thorny hedge. How long will we have to wait before the dragon appears? Will he even come?
The wind was on the withered heath
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.
The song is not true, my love. There is no wind here. If there was a forest, it has long since languished and died. Here and there I see evidence that trees once grew here, but all that remain now are few twisted and blasted husks, like like burned and gnarled hands trying to claw their way out of the cold, burnt earth. They look like skeletons to my eyes.
There is naught alive here but sere grasses that hiss beneath our feet, and rank, scraggly hedges that seem to be more thorn than leaf. What I would give now to hear a bird, or see a mouse or even a spider.
This is a desolate, forsaken land. If there is anything alive here, what could it possibly know of goodness? How could anything born into such a ruined and disconsolate land know happiness or sweetness, when all that they ever see is desolation? How could they know joy, when they are raised in a ruin?
Legend says that this was the breeding ground of the great dragons of old. Pippin, my dear, now that I see this land, I begin to understand why everyone thought I was mad to come here. Dragons must have no love in them at all to have chosen to bear their young in such a place as this. What mother would chose such a thing? Yet who am I to judge them, for am I not also a mother, and have I not left my own child in order to fulfill a foolish promise? Perhaps I should not be so quick to judge them.
We have reached our appointed destination. We left the cart in the middle of a field of dessicated and broken grasses. My companions and I, and of course Plum, for I will not leave the pony out to the mercy of the dragon, are watching from behind a thorny hedge. How long will we have to wait before the dragon appears? Will he even come?