A drouble (200 words)
Rating: PG for angst

E: LIKE AN EVIL ELROND

Frodo’s thought swam upward. The world swirled about him in a freezing mist of pain and weariness. Over and over he relived that instant, the pale face, its eyes cold and empty, frightening and filled with an awful blackness, looming over him with the knife, but ever the memory stopped there, before the pain, and he was once again thrust to the beginning, as he so foolishly placed the Ring on his finger. And now a pale face, frightening and filled with a terrible light in the eyes, unlike the cold dead eyes of his first memory. But looming over him with a knife, thrusting the point into his shoulder--

Pain! Agony lanced through him--surely he would die! Ai! His thought faded away and fled into blessed silence once more…

“I have it,” said Elrond, looking in disgust at the shard of the Morgul-knife, such a tiny foe to be so fell and loathsome. “I am afraid that at the last he perceived me. I hope that he will not remember when he awakens the pain I had to inflict upon him.”

“I do not think it will seem more to him than an evil phantom of delirium,” replied Aragorn.