Chapter 8: Nine Walkers Against a Mathematics They Cannot Name

We departed Rivendell on the twenty-fifth day of December, by the reckoning of a calendar that felt, in the cold of that morning, like a system of measurement designed for a world less interested in precision than the one I was now inhabiting. The date had been chosen by Elrond and Greyvast for reasons neither communicated directly, though I observed that Greyvast had spent the three preceding evenings in the upper library with a set of charts I was not invited to examine, and that his departure from the library on the final evening had carried the particular stillness of a man who has confirmed something he hoped not to confirm. I filed this under structured silences and carried it east.

The company assembled in the courtyard before full light. Elrond stood at the colonnade's edge and offered words I received as sound rather than meaning, the elvish diction too formal for the hour and too complete for the occasion — the speech of a being accustomed to conducting farewells across geological durations, calibrating each syllable against the possibility of centuries of hindsight. I watched his face rather than attended his words. He looked, throughout, like a man doing arithmetic he had performed many times before and whose result had never improved.

I used the time to catalogue.