Estel ná i lalië anwaleva, that is, to hope is to deny reality.
'Your time is up,' she said to me, while the sun rose on my last day. She spoke with no words as she is known to do, but it came at such a moment where I was truly frightened by it. The saying was sudden and the timing could be no more perfect if she wished to unsettle me. I will go then, though the few steps back westward I take frighten me more than any doom the White Lady could settle upon me.
I feel as if I move backwards and not forwards. Boli gives me odd looks, as he was sure this was a one-way trip for me. What place is there for Naire under the mountain? What place for softness and peace, among the peoples there who seek to war against the wickedness that has tainted their home?
It is among the stones and the dark that I am comfortable most, this is true, but their fights are not mine. My way will be made, and I will do as best I can to ignore and be ignored by the smallfathers that are my company now.
Lamaenon had been furious. It is more often that snow falls in Moria that I am well and truthfully unsettled, and my paleness had him storming off. I have not seen him since I replanted here under the mountain, but I know that word will find him. How hard it is to lose your right hand, I think.
... I wonder what is to become of me, now. I have grown tired of moving, of discontent among those who once offered sanctuary to me. The desire to plant, to stone my feet in a single place is very heavy upon me. Perhaps I shall have to be my own rock.
'I -am- the song,' I said once to a child who was wiser than I was. It is past time I take my own advice and seize comfort with my own hands, my own strength, instead of waiting and wasting my efforts upon such for others. My lesson has been learned at last.
