Shadows

Peregrine Took is no good at sneaking. Maybe it's the big fuzzy feet, or maybe it's the worried little sniffles between attempts to hold his breath. Either way, Boromir keeps scrounging for kindling under the sad icy scraps of old snow, offering Pippin the small mercy of choice in whether to speak of whatever has him so much on edge, or simply to slip away and pretend he's stayed in camp with the rest of the party.

The not-quite-silence stretches. His own boots scuff on the rocks as he crouches to gather another bundle of moss and furze and offer a brief,equally arid thought of thanks to whatever powers might be that the mountainside hasn't thawed in a very long time. A leathery sound tells him Pippin's doing the nervous-foot-scuff thing.

Sing Up the Dark

Vanka shaves her head in the early shadows of dusk, beside her sister's slumbering shape. She shaves away long lank locks of glossy black; she shaves away her husband's touch, her half-remembered mother's fingertips; she shaves away a lifetime's children who will never quicken, and when the first sob threatens she chokes it out into song, her rasping voice rising with the darkness to the stars' lonely eyes, singing, singing, singing up the darkness – not in the high tongue of the dark lords on their black horses, but in Orsi, her people's language, a tattered shroud of a tongue that refused to accept its own death.