He walked in the night, like a vision of Odin...though his smile was purley Loki's. The moonlight gleamed on his white robes, and grey hair, like tattered storm clouds. A ghostly avatar in the shimmering mists above the emerald grass of Rivendell, dissapearing in the phantasmagoric throng that faded in the pines. Oh Gandalf, whiter are thou going?

As a child I had often watched him go off in the night when he came. I wondered what he saw there amidst the trees. Often I had followed him along the path he made. His sandals made soft imprints in the ground; they were stars. Stars in the dust. Stars that sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

He would lean against the mighty oak tree and thoughtfully smoke his pipe. I could never again grasp the comfort felt from nestling agianst Gandalf and feeling the scratch of his beard while I inhaled the deep scent of pipe-weed.

In his hands was strength. He, among the few could tame the wild horses. Nay, not tame, not break them; he would befriend them. He could stop a runaway horse in their tracks by taking hold of the reins. He could even bend iron. But his physical strength could not compare to what else I had seen. He could call fire from his hands, weild the Winds. He could make the clouds moan and thunder with electrum, and send it crashing down with many a hissing scream. He could call the tides and move the water, and turn it suddenly to ice.

His voice was like the soft rustle of wind in the grass, touched with a note of the eroding river bed as the stones roll over eachother. Yet when he conjured, it was like the chours of the voices of the Vala welling underground, in the deep rocks and caverns and hidden places in stone and earth, and in the raging clouds. As above, so below

He could look into your heart and see what even you yourself could not see. Long have I desired to again clambor up into the old wizard's lap as he sat on the soft moss under the oak tree in Rivendell. I long to yet again nuzzle against his soft grey ramninent and wiery beard and let the soft smoke from the...hobbits, did he call them?...drift down about me like the Dragon's blood smoke from the censor at our worship circles. The rain would just be falling--a light drizzle, yet still he would pull his wayworn cloak about my small frame and whisper great tales of dragons and kings and strange creatures like hobbits and Ents and Men.

Yet alas! The day you sailed, Gandalf, is the day I heard the children and maidens weep, for thy ever mischevious yet brillant mind, thy strong and gentle hands, thy eyes like the glittering multitude of the inky indigo womb of Elbereth, and thy compassion for the toils of others that were not yours, is one I've never seen again.