Chapter 13: Greyvast Falls and Takes His Incomplete Calculations With Him

The cold light, when it came, came indifferently.

I have tried, in the interval between that emergence and the writing of these words, to characterize the quality of the daylight that received us at the eastern gate of Moria — whether it was sharp or diffuse, whether it carried the particular angle of morning or the flattened quality of overcast noon — and I find that my inventory of the moment contains everything except the light itself. There is stone. There is Samwell's hand, which had been on my arm since the Bridge and which released me at the threshold with the controlled deliberateness of a grip that has carried something fragile across a hazardous distance and now sets it down with care. There is the sound of the others — their breathing, the cadence of their feet on rock — organized around the central organizing fact that there were fewer feet than there had been.

I had been counting, since the bridge. It is the kind of counting one undertakes not for information but for occupation — the arithmetic of a mind that requires continuous input or will turn, in the absence of supply, toward the thing it is being managed away from.