All Shall Fade (LOTR-Wattys 2014)

All Shall Fade - Chapter 5 - Mad World (LOTR)

All Shall Fade

Chapter 5

Mad World

Our party – now depleted in number – walked on through the night, and through into the next day. Everything hurt, my feet, my ribs, but mostly my arm. The dull throbbing was now peaking at an almost unbearable pain. Unbearable or not, I tried my best to ignore it. It was probably nothing compared to what Frodo was going through… I didn’t dare think of any alternative to his fate. I had to remain positive.

Every now and then, I’d pull up the sleeve of my hoodie to examine my arm. The lines had been creeping further across my skin. Last night they had been around halfway up the inside of my arm, but now they were closer to the inside of my elbow, and had been spreading onto the other side of my arm too. Whenever I touched it, a searing pain would fire up my arm, giving me a headache and making me dizzy, so I tried to avoid contact with the lines. I couldn’t figure out what had caused it, but it was scaring me a lot.

We walked on through the day, over different terrains like grasslands, but mostly through forests. I couldn’t recognise any of the landscape, and what confused me most was that the only mountains I could see were in the distance. If we were in the Mournes, we should be surrounded by them. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger… What made it worse was the fact that nobody spoke. We were all wrapped up in our own individual thoughts and worries. I attempted to bottle everything up, shut all my worry and confusion away in the back of my mind, and pretend that I was just on a walk, but I couldn’t. I had so many unanswered questions, and the pain in my arm made it impossible to ignore the fact that something very much out of the ordinary was going on here. I just wanted to go home. Was that too much to ask for?

Apparently it was.

The sun was beginning to get low in the sky as we entered another forest. I wondered if we would once again walk on into the night, but Strider stopped beside a small stream and turned back to us.

“We can rest here for the night; I’m just going to look around.” He stated, and I heard the Hobbits behind me sigh with relief. I’d taken to referring to them as ‘Hobbits’, it was an easier collective term to use instead of ‘short guys’. I sat down by the stream as another bout of dizziness hit me – once again caused by the mysterious, spidery vein-like markings on my arm.

“Are you alright Alice?” Pippin asked concernedly, and I nodded – even though the movement made my head spin.

“Y-yeah,” I stammered, “I think I just need a drink.” I gingerly got to my feet, testing my balance before standing up straight and walking over to the water’s edge. I crouched down and splashed my face with the cool water. Only then did I realise that my skin was ice cold and much paler than usual. Was I sick? I frowned as I stared at my rippling, distorted reflection in the flowing water. I wasn’t a pretty sight; my hair was a tangled mess of leaves, twigs and mud, my skin was grubby and as pale as death, and I had massive, bruise-like dark circles under my eyes. I rubbed at them, but it didn’t seem to make it any better. The sun was beginning to sink below the horizon of trees and stars were appearing overhead as I pulled back the sleeve of my hoodie and lightly traced my fingertips over the pulsing marks which had crept past my elbow and had almost reached my upper arm. I flexed my fingers, but they felt stiff and brittle, as if I would break them by moving. It was the same when I tried moving my arm from the elbow down. Brittle and painful. I sighed and timidly touched once of the thicker lines – wincing in pain as it throbbed in protest. To the touch it was a curious mixture of hot and cold sensations, but it was still sore. In a desperate, almost panicked attempt to cure myself, I began to wash my arm in the river, ignoring the pain as I rubbed at the lines, but they wouldn’t fade.