Chapter 9: Caradhras Refuses to Be Crossed

The snow began as suggestion.

I mark this because suggestion is a mode of communication I have learned, over the months since Bag End, to receive with the same methodical attention I once reserved for the explicit. The first flakes fell three days out from Rivendell — fell not with the haphazard organic quality of Shire winters, which arrive in gusts and curtains and the cheerful accumulation of a world conducting its ordinary meteorological business, but with a deliberation I could not attribute to intention and therefore found considerably more troubling than if I could have. Intention implies a mind. A mind can be negotiated with, or fled, or at the very extreme of options, opposed. What fell on Caradhras in those first hours felt like none of those possibilities.

It felt like condition. Like the application of a governing principle to a set of variables. Like weather deployed in the mathematical sense.