A Use for Hobbits

He sleeps in short shifts, folded under his cloak like a soldier laid out for burial. The reassuring familiarity of cold earth bears him up; cold earth and stone; the floor of a cave, he knows in waking moments – knows too that the entrance is just a smidgen narrower than the span of his outstretched arms, that Strider can stretch out full-length across the cave but couldn't if he were much taller, that the crevice at the back doesn't extend any further than the light of a candle and that the crevice in question is just wide enough to hold the two older hobbits in a sort of granite cradle.

He knows it's snowing. The air has that whispering hush to it. He knows it must be cold, though for his own part he hasn't been warm since he lost Osgiliath.

He knows he's a very long way from home.

All of this rests at a level close to the subconscious – mental muscle-memory, perhaps. It certainly doesn't account for Legolas urgently nudging his arm and whispering “Wake up. Wake up,” and then, after the half-second it takes to accomplish that, before he can make a sound, “Shhh.”

She

He walked in on her bathing in the river, which, given their respective personalities, wouldn't have been either as romantic or as creepy (depending upon one's perspective) as it sounded, even if Merry and Pippin hadn't done so first and stood there with their mouths hanging open, waiting for something to fly in. Boromir flipped their cloaks over their heads and picked them up by the scruff, one in each hand, without breaking stride – and not a second too soon, to judge by the gruff bellow of “Oy! Hobbits!” from the water fast disappearing behind a screen of trees.

Gifts - Pt. I

For his eleventh birthday, with some portion of the monies their father gave him or his sixteenth, his elder brother buys him a horse from Rohan – as if it is not enough simply to be there, the young general fresh back from a hard campaign with (somehow – he had always had a talent for miracles) stories to enrapture a child whose interests lay primarily between books' covers. As if it is not enough simply to love the second son, the extra child – as if it is not enough to stride in with the northeast wind of spring at his back and swoop up in strong arms warm as the wind is cold a boy few others even notice and wish him, quietly, in a voice so imbued with affection that the words glow softly golden in the boy's mind, “Happy birthday, little one.”

Nobody's Children

Sarah had been coming to the Labyrinth for over half a decade by the day on which she found its king, with a freshly stitched cut on his right cheek, playing with a wished-away child -

- widdershins thirteen times around her room, colourful walls pinwheeling together, and dizzily through the mirror; forget which way is up (the dizziness helps) and hop twice to the left, because it's Tuesday (maybe) and play skip-rope with the ceiling fan, then out through the skylight into the long dimly-lit gold stone hatcheries of the False Alarms.

The Winter King

Not all, or even most, of the great maze of the Labyrinth is in the world. Perhaps the best example of this is the Wide Tract of Rottenness, which looks like a dump in the form of a ring, some five miles wide at its broadest point, encircling the Goblin City. It is a mess, maybe even the quintessential mess, but the path through the Tract doesn't twist and contradict itself and go off on crazy angles. It's just a path.

The problem here is the Junk Ladies. They're probably not all ladies, or even women, but that's beside the point. Sooner or later, they all call themselves Agnes, anyway. Some taxonomists argue that they are a type of goblin; others say no, the Agnessi should, in fact, be classified as a sort of highly evolved hermit crab.

The Sky Has Claws

Creaking in the New Year's cold, the old man peered into the crevice between book-cases. In its depth lurk a few forgotten nibs, much darkness, innumerable dust bunnies, and a recalcitrant grandson. In his younger days, he thinks, he might have discerned more than the hint of a form, solid and stubborn in the shadows.

Ginger Peach

Spring came on suddenly, like desert rain. Sarah, forever in love with the turning of the seasons, woke up full of light and floated to the window, with breath bated until the rush of cool air twirled her around, and she breathed out a laugh and, inhaling, felt her eyes sting at the cold. It could not be much above freezing, but the world had shifted. It was spring, spring, spring!

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.

The Road Through the Maze

Of the realm of Jareth the Goblin King (a border kingdom and thus half dependent upon the hopes, fears and fantasies of mortals Above,) some will look at its construction and say, "But it is ill-named! It is not a labyrinth at all, but a maze! A labyrinth is supposed to have a straight line to the center!"

As with so many other statements about this bizarre kingdom, that is only half true.

There is a road.

Vanka of Ten Thousand Scars

An officer and tribal leader at the time of the War of the Ring, Vanka is one of very few orc women to rise as high as she has; another is her sister, Irinna, an elective mute and perhaps even a greater force to be reckoned with on the battlefield than Vanka herself, which is a high compliment indeed.

No One Remembered

He would not mourn her.

Hers had been a heroic death, all told – valiant and selfless, if hardly picturesque. Two out of three wasn't bad. But he would not mourn her. He would not grant her such an early death; he would not let her go so easily, nor lie so heavy on his conscience. He would keep her exhausted and beautiful, radiantly defiant, not angry but joyous in her epiphany, denying him. He would not mourn her.

After all, he had no power over her.

Faramir - facial ref. sheet

I subvert things, more or less by existing, and LOTR, despite its in many ways fantastic world-building, is ripe for subversion largely because Tolkein was so very Anglocentric - I mean, he was a British professor writing in the first half of the twentieth century, so it sort of comes with the territory but it's still quite glaringly THERE.

And Gondor is sort of the Faded Classical Culture of that world.

And I like doing character design.

And so I decided Gondorians look sort of Greco-roman, with olive skin, arched noses, dark curly hair, etc.  My friend Pearl enjoys my bizarre ramblings and has been wanting to draw my version of Denethor's sons, and was having a hard time with Faramir, ergo, facial ref-sheet.  He looks considerably less Grecian than many of his people due his Numenorian mum.

Thunk!

It was not so much administration as entertainment, but he'd grown expert at getting them to accomplish some approximation of what he wanted, albeit that this frequently involved a dramatic lowering of expectations on his part. The disturbing thing about ruling goblins, however, is that one must think like a goblin and, after innumerable eons, he still wasn't at all sure that goblins thought. And then he realised that he had, on the first attempt, conjugated that as 'thunk'. Jareth briefly considered throwing himself off the nearest cliff.