Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Two - The Shire

Word Count: 2,874 words. 

Warnings: None. 

The carriage ride was bumpy to say the least. Arathial was used to travelling with discomfort and she had been on all kinds of different modes of transport but there was nothing as uncomfortable as a carriage. To her, horseback was the best way to travel and currently her dear horse was tied up to the front of the carriage she rode in.

Perhaps her discomfort was entirely a result of the wood beneath her back but perhaps also with the thoughts of her destination. The Shire. She had only been once or twice. Hobbits were never her kind of people but she had to admit that they were kind and usually welcoming.

The last time she had seen the hills of Bag End was when Gandalf called her to help Thorin Oakenshield on his quest to reclaim The Lonely Mountain. That had been the last time she had talked to most people.

"Are you worried, my dear?" Gandalf asked, hands on the reigns.

Arathiel smiled. "Perhaps a little," she admitted. "I fear that the Hobbit's will not recognise me."

"You have not changed in the years since seeing them last," the wizard explained. "It is hardly you they will not recognise. Perhaps it is their features that you will mistake for someone else."

The elf shook her head. "It is hard to forget their faces when they have haunted my dreams for decades, Mithrandir."

The greying wizard sighed. Arathiel could hear the sound of Gandalf's fireworks moving in the back of the carriage. The silence that settled between them was deafening.

Silences had always been a comfort between the elf and the wizard but there had been times in their long existence together where those small silences had turned uncomfortable. Where both knew that there was something amiss, both between them and in the world around them. This was one of those few times.

Turning her head to watch the sun in the sky, Arathiel spotted a single figure sat beneath a large tree off on the distance. She was reading quietly to herself with no one around her to be a bother. Arathiel remembered that tree. She remembered it well.

"I think I must speak with her," Arathiel spoke up, gaining Gandalf's attention. He turned to see what it was the elf had been looking at before nodding shortly.

"I will see you at Bilbo's."

Arathiel nodded and, letting the wizard stop the carriage first, hopped off the side of it. Her hand instinctively went to steady the sword on her waist. It was an old blade. One that she hadn't always used. Arathiel had handled many blades in her lifetime, but one for longer than most. It wasn't the one she wore now.

Pushing up the hill, Arathiel made sure to keep her eyes fixed on the peaceful woman. It seemed as though she hadn't noticed the elf approach but Arathiel knew better than to underestimate Rose Baggins.

"I had thought that I would die before seeing you again," she spoke up, turning her eyes from the book she read.

Arathiel gave her a simple smile. "I almost hoped to wait that long."

Rose smiled, but unlike the elf's, hers was genuine. Rose, like her brother, had curly hair that framed her face. Where it had once been brown and reached past her shoulder, it now was grey and barely reached the base of her neck.

Her scar was still there. The long, painful line that reached from the top of her face all the way down to the end of her jaw. It had just missed her eye, instead slicing along the bridge of her nose and although it had healed with time, turning white from age, it was still the first thing you noticed about the Hobbit. Even in her old age, her wrinkles couldn't hide her pain.