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When Winter Fell  by Lindelea

Chapter 26. From the Journal of Fortinbras Took, S.R. 1158

The Wizard is gone. Just like that.

No, my dear friend and Journal, he did not disappear, poof, into nothing, but he did leave abruptly, spurning Grandfa's hospitality in a way that would have been most impolite, if not for his grave manner and regretful mien.

Grandfa urged him to stay, most earnestly, but no! ...he must go, and reach his destination (where ever that may be--over rivers, perhaps? beyond mountains?) ahead of the snow.

One might laugh, as Uncle S. observed, and yet, the snow last week...? Fully a week before Even-night, the day when Light and Darkness are in perfect balance, before the long, slow slide into darkness and long winter nights. Long before the First of October, the earliest that the oldest among the gaffers and gammers can remember even the merest dusting of snow. Mid-September, rather. Odd, that, very much out of the ordinary, even, one might say, extra-ordinary, and that is not a word used lightly, not even by the Tooks.

No indeed, no one, not a one, laughed at the Wizard's excuse, poor as it might have seemed in days gone by, in other years.

And to night we celebrated as we usually do, Even-night, with feasting and frolic and harvest songs, roasting apples over the fire in the great room (for the rain is still pounding, and there is no Bonfire this year in the courtyard of the Great Smials, with all of Tuckboro invited to join the Thain and his family), and drinking punch, and playing at games, and all the rest of the things that strengthen the spirit to meet the encroaching darkness.

But for some reason I kept thinking of the Wizard, gone his solitary way, out in the pounding rain, sopping no doubt, perhaps in danger of catching his death.

Do Wizards fall ill, I wonder? Can a Wizard catch his death, as any other Man, or Hobbit, even?

I must ponder this. Uncle S. says that Wizards are like Elves, and go on for ever (and a day into the bargain). Perhaps that is why the old man looked so weary.

I wish he'd stayed longer, until he was well rested, before he recommenced his journey.

He told such wonder-full stories.


***
A/N: Thanks to Dreamflower for working out the term Even-night, from Old English, as a plausible Shire term for the autumnal equinox.





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