Anneth has long clung to her dreams, though sorrow has threatened to murder them again and again. There was a time when sorrow made her hopes only sweeter, but as Sauron grows yet stronger in the East, she feels everything she has ever held dear fal...
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
- Proverbs 17:22
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
- Robert Frost
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"Anneth, Anneth, Anneth..."
"Oh, Amarwe will you cease that! Anneth is my name, quite aware am I of that, and please, stop!"
"Sister, why?"
"Because it is beginning to aggravate me, little one."
"Humph. But I want to tell you something!"
"Go on, then, tell me something."
"I'm getting married!"
"Why, Amarwe, you are but ten years of age!"
"Oh, not now, of course, but later. In about a hundred years."
"And to whom will you be wed?"
"I don't know. An ellon."
"Of course, you shall marry an ellon, Amarwe, but what shall his name be?"
The elfling girl shrugged.
"Sister, you don't know what your husband's name will be, do you? And you're two hundred years older than me!"
"I am going to marry Greenwood's Prince Legolas," said Anneth, her countenance serious and unwavering.
"You're joking!" cried her little sister, leaping about, her energy never spent.
"No, little one, why should I jest of such a serious matter as marriage!"
Amarwe gasped. "You mean to say you really will marry him? How can you know, you've never met him?!"
"Ai, am jesting, little sister," she said, patting her small sister's head. Anneth laughed. "Once I was truly set on marrying him, but then I was small and silly. And many of my playmates were set on wedding him as well. Somehow we were all going to marry him. Quite silly, and slightly disgusting."
"So who will you marry, Anneth?" asked the small girl, looking at her older sister with admiration.
"I do not know. I can only wait for him every day."
"That's a lot of waiting. Two hundred years of it. A lot of your friends are already married, yes?"
"Yes, many are. But there is no discontentment, I shall gladly wait."
"What if you marry late, Anneth? Voronen told me yesterday that people who marry late have strange fates."
Anneth laughed quietly and shook her head, eyes rolling in slight distaste. "Our brother is silly, Amarwe. But if it should mean I will still marry, I will gladly accept whatever strange fate given me."
