After departing the Hall of Fire in somewhat of a rush, Calanis had retreated to her usual destination for silence, contemplation and healing of woes of the fëa. There where the Bruinen descends from the Hithaeglir, it clashes down into the Hidden Valley with great force and a roaring noise of the water upon the rocks. At the bottom of that waterfall, on a damp, mossy ledge, she sat down. Now and then dusted with the gentle spray of droplets on the wind, she closed her eyes and let her troubling thoughts pass through her mind one by one.
The sun set, twilight enveloped Imladris in a warm indigo hue, the moon rose, and the stars watched over her until the light of the next dawn.
“Oh, what have I done… and what have I promised to do… The danger that I perceived in every darkened corner of the Valley has been dragged into the light, but is all truly revealed now? I fear it is not. A sense of dread remained, that is why I asked her… thought to her: “Why?” Her response haunts me. Beyond her thoughts of anger and bloodthirst there was an image: a small village engulfed in smoke and flames, a dead man on the ground, his skull broken by many blows of a blunt weapon, and a crying child at his side, hopeless against the evils of the world without her father beside her.
Then she resisted, showed me no more, and guilt continues to linger in my mind. How can I have empathy for this murderous monster knowing what lives she has taken, what hideous violence she inflicted upon her innocent victims, and yet, how can I remain unmoved after feeling the pain of that little girl, how can I side with those who inflicted it upon her? Both notions horrify me and leave me disgusted with myself…
And then those accursed gemstones, I understand little of what forces are at play, but they seem to me foul and dark… Much darkness is influencing us all since the presence of those stones. It should be a relief to know the real purpose of the quests to retrieve them, and that our expedition to Erebor and back was not just undertaken to satisfy the needs of a sufferer of goldsickness… but the relief is small after all that has transpired since.
But within this tangled web of darkness, there is one thing I am certain of. The violence must stop. The acts of revenge will continue to go back and forth, taking more lives, spilling more innocent blood, and fostering more hatred, if neither side will seize. Though I fear she is too far gone herself, I must see her again. It terrifies me, but I shall have to open my mind. I have to speak to her again.”
The birds started to sing their first songs of the day, and the warmth of the earliest sunrays reached the mossy rock by the waterfall. Only then Calanis was drawn out of her ruminations and did she realize how cold her body had become. She slowly stood up and wandered downstream towards her home.
