Chapter 7: The Ruins at Var Aethon and What the Inscriptions Are Not Saying

The ruins appeared first as a quality of the light.

This was how Frodo recorded it, in an entry dated the seventh day east of Aelindrath: not as structure or silhouette, but as a difference in the late afternoon air above a low ridge, a heaviness of illumination that was not the heaviness of storm, not the density of fog, but something more deliberate — a thickening of the visible, as though the atmosphere had acquired opinions about what passed through it. He wrote this and then drew a small circle in the margin, his habitual notation for observations that resisted categorization, and the circle was the fifteenth such notation in the entry. He had begun the journey with an average of three per entry. He had not yet noticed the trend.

Thordun noticed the ridge first in a professional capacity. He had been walking with his head slightly forward since the previous morning, in the manner of a man conducting a continuous survey that he has not announced, and when the ruins resolved themselves through the afternoon glare he stopped and took from his coat a small worn journal — not the primary field notebook but a secondary volume he consulted rather than wrote in — and spent a long moment cross-referencing something he had been carrying, it appeared, for some time. He closed the secondary journal. He did not share its contents.