Walking is easy, the company less so. You have not yet decided which is worse: the smell, or the noise. The dwarf belches. It is the noise. But in his tossing sleep he tumbles close to you. His beard is damp from the chill. Then you know. It is the smell.

You miss the trees of Mirkwood. You miss even the shadows that creep in beneath the branches. Sometimes the ring tells you that it could make all the lands a forest. You take a moment to savor the thought, but do not dwell on it. The ring is worse than both the smell and the noise.

Galadriel tells you that the trees hated all the living beings, before they learned to listen to them. That night the dwarf snores especially loudly. You spend most of the night listening, and hope this is not what Galadriel meant.

Later, the dwarf finds you among the mellorn. He begins to speak, and so you listen – to the remembrances of the trees and the sighs of the flowers, but also to the dwarf. He is saying something about Moria. How he misses that place, even the shadows in the great empty halls and the deeper shadows below. So you stand with him in the golden light, both of you longing for shadows.

When the boats are pulled up to the shore, you walk over to the dwarf, who is staring at the lembas in his hand. “The taste goes a bit stale, after a few hundred years,” you whisper to him.

His eyes move up and down your face, and then his beard moves with laughter. “Get in here, elf,” he says. “I'll need another pair of arms to keep this afloat.”

So it is you and the dwarf in the boat.

No.

His name is Gimli. You decide to remember that.