Chapter 9: Frodo Begins to Hear It in Languages

From the personal journal of Frodo Greyfoot (archive designation GF-7742, entries designated by his own hand as the "Eastern Series"), recovered from the satchel delivered by Samwise Deeproot to the Aelindrath Archive following the expedition's conclusion. The following entries span eleven days beginning two days east of Dunmere. Editorial apparatus supplied by the Archive's comparative documents office; see appended note on the phonetic transcriptions, which have not been reproduced in full for reasons the office declines to enumerate but which are addressed in the footnote the serious reader is advised to approach at their own discretion.

The wind today was doing something I have not heard it do before, which is to say that it was doing something that I am not certain wind is the correct word for, though the air moved and the grass bent and the practical indicators of wind were present. What was not present — what was, rather, absent in the specific way that an expected note is absent when you are listening for it — was the quality of randomness. Wind, as I have observed it in the Mirelands across my nineteen years of living in proximity to a great deal of it, is various and occasionally beautiful but it is not organized. It does not return, in the space of a single morning, to the same sequence of intervals with sufficient regularity that you begin to anticipate the next. I began to anticipate the next.

I set down my walking stick at roughly the third hour after dawn and I stood still on the eastern road and I listened. Arathas walked on for perhaps twenty paces before he noticed I had stopped and turned back with the expression he wears when something requires addressing. I was aware of him returning and aware also that I had not yet finished what I was doing, and I raised a hand, not toward him specifically but in the general direction of any concern, and I went on listening.