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The fire still crackled. Beside him, Pippin sang in a high, remarkably sweet voice, while Merry accompanied him on a reed flute. The tune was the Lay of Leithian. As Aragorn turned to look, Gimli drew out a small tambor and joined in with perfect time.
Despite the noise, Frodo still slept, his hand curled between his heart and his left shoulder. Sam sat by him, chewing his lower lip as he studied his master’s pale face and clenched fingers. Sam’s own hands were busy, as usual. He stropped the head of a wicked black arrow against a whetstone.
On the other side of the fire, Legolas and Boromir bent over a chessboard. Not just any chessboard, but the painted ivory set that he had brought from Harad as a present for Elrond all those years ago. He remembered how difficult it had been to tie the bulky box on his horse, and how he’d worried that the slender pieces would break during the trip. Surely Elrond wouldn’t have sent the set out on such a perilous mission? Shouldn’t he have noticed the inlaid ebony box in his comrades’ gear before this?
Boromir lifted one of the mumiaks, with its pale trunk raised to bugle. He paused to study the delicate carving, then turned to face the other man as he slid it forward. “Well, obviously this is a dream,” he said dryly. “You should ask the Grand Vizier.”
Aragorn looked for Boromir’s Vizier, which lay by the side of the board, next to both of Legolas’ armored chariots and a scattering of infantry pieces, victims of some earlier exchange. They must now be in the midgame, Aragorn noted as he studied the board. Both kings were in peril, though Legolas had barricaded the black king shrewdly behind a fence of cavalry and mumiaks, while Boromir more daringly advanced his white king on the attack among the infantry pieces. He looked back at the captured Vizier, but the ivory figure lay as still as a piece of ivory. Looking back to the board, he found Legolas’ Vizier in the far corner of the board, seemingly uninvolved in the center of the game.
The chess piece stepped off the board as he watched, growing as it did. Before it stopped, Aragorn had to look up at the figure. It became a man: tall, slender, pale-skinned, dark-haired and bright-eyed as a lord of the Noldor, yet taller, thinner, paler, darker and brighter than any of them, wrapped in a muffling robe of black.
“I am Dream of the Endless. I came to see you, since it is rare to find a mortal of whom all of my siblings both know and approve.”
He smiled thinly. “Even Delirium and Despair, after they spent that week with you in the mountains.” Dream nodded over Aragorn’s shoulder, where the figures of Sam and Frodo caught his eye. His stomach wrenched with remembered nausea as Aragorn recognized the arrow that the hobbit held: the very same barbed goblin arrow he’d pulled from his own thigh, sticky with poison beneath the smear of his blood. During the week of misery that followed he’d neither eaten nor slept, struggling to survive the poison, the cold, the pursuing orcs and his own growing weakness, while inside him the fear grew stronger. Not only to die, but to fail. To fail his family and his people and the years of training, to fail Arwen’s faith in him.
“Have you come to test me, Lord? Or to tell me something?” Despite his best efforts, Aragorn’s voice quavered. It had taken him a little while, but he remembered reading of the Endless in an age-browned scroll that had been rescued from fallen Gondolin. Delirium, Dream and Desire, but also Desire, Destiny, Death and Destruction. Even the gentlest of them was terrible.
The visitor met his gaze directly, showing him a glimpse of eternity in their star-filled blackness. Aragorn felt insignificant in the face of such depth, and yet more densely real than he ever had before, at the center of the Endless lord’s attention. “No, Aragorn. I came to listen.”