Deorwyn, or She Who Delights In Wild Things- Book One of the Eryniel Saga

The wizard slept, and dreamed.

A little girl, with hair like tumbling gold and eyes like the forest, her rosebud lips wet with blood and she coughed and coughed, shivering in the cold morning light. She clutched a doll in one hand, and tried hard to keep the thumb she sucked for comfort in her mouth.

Even in sleep, Gandalf knew the child was sick, dying, but not so close to death that she could not be saved. Was this dreaming, or foresight? Distanced as he was from his dreaming, he knew it was at least not reality. But who was this little girl? She seemed so familiar….

Two boys on horseback, both about thirteen, riding as if their lives depended on it, galloping away from a group of orcs. They try to make for the great hall looming up before them, but before they can make it, an arrow pierces the smaller boy’s back. He cries out, clinging to his horse, and the orcs gain on them.

Gandalf recognized one of those boys: Eomer, King Théoden’s nephew. The bigger one who had remained unscathed, as far as the wizard could tell. These dreams had the taste of foresight to them, and he had to wonder why this was all so very important.

Treebeard, the Ent of Fangorn, looking as if something were eating away at him from the inside out, something that blackened his leaves and twisted his branches, and brought hideous, painful shadows to his eyes. He shuddered and coughed and wheezed, none of his usual ba-ra-ra-room! He seemed shrunken and weak, sickening, and all around him Ents lay dying on the ground, and the forest was screaming.

With a cry of horror, the wizard bolted upright in his bed, and found himself safe, right where he’d expected, Rivendell. But on the covers of his bed lay three things: a single golden hair, the black fletching of an Orc arrow, and a twisted, dying oak leaf.