#*|* not all who goes in / will come back out “|” :: North & South Barrow-downs

[rangers-arecool]

@lordsxfgondor asked: "Is this what you really want, or are you just running from something?" (From Aragorn or Faramir for Hal)

She didn't turn to look at the other Ranger not surprised that he had managed to find her in the ruins of Ost Gorthad. There were very few people who could wander the Barrow-downs and not get killed or lost in the mists. Most Sentinels and Guides preferred to stay away from the area, for it played tricks on their senses and empathy.

For Hal though, the Barrow-downs had always been a place of safety. The spirits and walking skeletons didn't mind her presence as she was always visiting. But that wasn't the same for Aragorn. She turned after a moment to face him, reaching out with her empathy to shield his mind from the tricks of the mists.

"Yes it is. I don't want anyone else as my Sentinel, Strider."

[rangers-are-cool-moved]

‘ because you're my friend. any more stupid questions? ’ (Hal)

A sharp sideways glance was the only response Hal gave to that particular answer. "Just one more. How good are you with the Dead? Because we have semi friendly incoming."

@thegreatstrongbow

[elane-in-the-shadows]

Red Queen Fan Fiction - Blood Curse part 13

Find this on wattpad

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

chapter 23

chapter 24

chapter 25

chapter 26

chapter 27

chapter 28

chapter 29

Final chapter

Mare POV

Half a dozen maps are spread on Farley’s desk, some of them drawn by Guard members, all of them filled with annotations and battle plans. I’m supposed to be briefed about my orders for the next day, yet my eyes stray to the other maps, depicting the regions of Norta, the Lakelands, Piedmont and Monfort. A few weeks have passed since the colonel joined Volo Samos’s campaign against the Lakelands with a few hundred soldiers, their progress from Corvium to Detraeon’s outskirts drawn onto the map in thin black lines.

“Mare.” I look up, Farley’s back from changing Clara’s diapers. She points to the Archeon map. “Your role is to take over the eastern power plant; Ella and Tyton are in the north and south west,” she explains. “Estimated time for the blackout is 0800 but you’ll have to radio each other to coordinate the timing.” She pauses. I nod, yet she already goes on. “I suppose there’ll be room for deviations because of other assaults.”

“Can’t you finally be clear, Farley?” Her hesitation with details is getting annoying. “What other assaults? Who else is there? What will they do – what will you do?”

Her expression doesn’t waver but she chews on her lip. “We make utmost use of our teleporters,” she reports in a neutral, detached tone. “You’ll be brought to a safe house outside of the city before the teleporters will transfer you to your destination, with stays in other safe houses in between. They’ve done this for days, and our Silver allies are already in Archeon and preparing. The movements are necessary to hide the operations. The Lerolan faction and I have coordinated a double assault against Archeon’s infrastructure, while several chosen operatives – ”

“The Lerolan faction? You mean Tiberias.”

She frowns before she nods. “Yes, Calore. And Anabel Lerolan and her seconds. I’ve communicated with them the whole time.” She shrugs. “Would you have liked to … talk to Calore as well?”

I say nothing.

“Mare?”

“I don’t know, it’s just – it’s strange. You plan with him while I can’t bear – can’t know – if I even want to talk to him again.” I shake my head. “And what did your spies tell you about Maven?”

She takes a sharp breath to confirm my jab. I wave off. “I don’t want to know. You aren’t letting me kill him either way.”

“No,” she says, finally insistent. Then she sighs. “But I don’t have the right to stop you, not if retribution is what you crave.”

I lean over the desk, my hands pressed on the maps. I stare into her eyes, five seconds, ten seconds. She gives in and looks away. “I know my orders,” I mutter. “You gave them for a reason after all, so who am I to act against them?”

Her relief is audible. “Right,” she says, clearing her throat. “Thanks. Now, your flight goes at 0400, then you’ll deactivate electricity in the east, depending on the charge against Whitefire by a few chosen operatives.”

“I hope Calore won’t act against his orders,” I say.

“Hopefully,” she agrees. But she’s too stressed to smile. Or too doubtful.

“In exchange for my trust,” I ask, “you might tell me where you’re going tonight?”

She ponders.

“Don’t tell me you just want to avoid all the teleporting?”

“What? No, I’ll – “ She’s interrupted by Clara’s new wailing. Farley dashes to her cot and picks her up. “I have to feed her,” she calls to me. I know it’s a dismissal but my curiosity remains.

I don’t receive more of an answer when she brings Clara to us the same night. Farley is wholly occupied by Mom who either cuddles Clara or pesters and scolds Farley about her mission. They’ve had these talks before, but Mom is especially insisting tonight. We all know there’s more at stake than in the skirmishes before. Gisa huddles close to me and holds my hand, but she doesn’t speak. Kilorn’s on my other side, reminding me that I’ll have to protect him tomorrow. He’s in the team coming with me to the power plant. Strangely, it fees less like a burden than I assumed it would. His joking tone is full of trust in me and I’m determined to live up to it. I retire just when Farley’s about to leave with her team, giving Clara a last kiss and murmured goodbyes. Even Dad hugs her.

I’ve trained enough in the last days to get a few hours of sleep. Mom hardly allows me to go when it’s my turn, even though Kilorn and Tramy are coming as well. I promise her to return and she wishes me luck, her words encouraging me further. 

Excitement and exhaustion fill me up during the flight, and I doze off again, waking a few minutes before the landing. I see Tramy talk to a Silver woman and go over my orders again, discussing them with Kilorn and the other members of my team. They show even more focus. The last moments on the plane pass in awkward but concentrated silence until we arrive just outside of Archeon.

Everything goes quickly there. Soldiers grab their guns, weapons and armour, even I take a vest and a knife while the teleporters already line up to take soldiers to their destinations, according to the coded cards they produce. The Newbloods appear tired and pale, unsurprising after they did this for days. But when Kilorn and I are snatched by a teleporter, an older man, the movement wakes a familiar nausea, a pain stinging me for a moment.

We can’t unpack anything and stay only for a couple of minutes before the next jump. Hectic rules the cold rooms we get to.

“If I counted right, this is the last safe house before the power plant,” Kilorn informs me. “We’ll stay until the assault begins.”

I nod. “Then waiting for news from Ella and Tyton.”

A heat wave passes behind my back. Although I tell myself it’s only a finally heated radiator, I turn around and can’t believe my eyes to see Tiberias, dressed in a weirdly mixed uniform of Scarlet Guard and Silver design, running between the groups of soldiers. I whisper his name and I don’t know whether he heard me or if someone’s pointed to me. Tiberias spins around.

And walks to me.

“Good to see you,” he says to both of us. Only that, and quite causally. Probably, he gives the same greeting to everyone here. Kilorn grimaces but shakes hands with Tiberias. The king-to-be offers the same to me and I outstretch my palm. Yet I throw myself against his chest and hug him, feeling his warm hands on my back through the fabric of my uniform. It lasts just for a second. We part, and he’s heading to another group. “Good luck,” he says and adds, “don’t be afraid, it’s intentional.” It should mean nothing but his tiny smile, a fracture in his general’s attitude, gives me hope.

I remember Farley’s words about the Silvers’ plans but Tiberias’s advice makes me wonder if it’ll be worse than I imagined.

Kilorn squeezes my hand while my eyes continue to follow Tiberias’s route through the cramped building. Finally, he lifts a hand and a teleporter jumps him away. Another officer shouts a countdown and at zero, after a second of dreadful silence, I hear the explosions. It’s not bombs alone; the earth begins to shake. It unsettles the whole room but the effect is small compared to what I can see with a short glimpse through a tiny window: Streets are breaking, bridges fall, buildings tumble. The Lerolan oblivions, spread all over the territory, attack the capital itself. The reactions set forth over a whole minute that feels eternal, the noise reverberating in my ears. Their explosions, together several bombs, destroy the stage Maven created for himself.

I’ve been told several minor attacks were started to warn and scare away the grunt of the civillian populace, leaving me to wonder how effective that was. Then Arezzo, one teleporter I know, takes me, Kilorn, and the rest of our team to the eastern power plant.

The first thing I see, still dizzy from the jump, is a corpse. It freezes Kilorn more than me and I have to pull him away although I can feel my own shock as well. He quickly lets go of me and moves ahead, to my worry. But he’s learned more about this place than I did.

Luckily, the plant was already raided. Not so luckily, I don’t know if that reassures me, facing several killed operators while the Reds among them have been arrested. I stop our tracks after I notice the first halfway safe room.

“This one’s okay,” I call out. “I can do it from here.” I click on the radio, relief rushing through when I hear the voices of the other electricons, even though both of them sound as stressed as I am.

“Mare?” Ella asks through the white noise.

“Ready to turn off the city?” I say.

“Been ready for hours, Barrow,” Tyton replies, and I can imagine his sneer in my mind. “Going off in 20 s.”

I close my eyes and concentrate on nothing but the electricity roaming the place in turbines and generators, wires and conducts. I draw it the energy to me, into my body, just until the brink of keeping it contained into myself. It’s a tight fit, as I can’t keep sparks from jumping off my skin. Then I motion for my comrades to shut down the engines. I don’t have to see them pull the lever and clicking on the computers, my electrical sense is more accurate than my eyes. But no matter how much they researched before, they aren’t able to know enough to turn off all emergency bypasses – that is my task. I stop every electron from leaving the plant’s conduct to leave a considerable quarter of the city, as well as the place we’re in, in darkness.

I have to concentrate harder to stop any pulses, bypasses, and other devices in close vicinity, hearing several gasps of surprise. I can’t help everyone complaining about their flashlights though. A comrade guides me to the roof, explaining we need to observe from above. For once, I have to wonder if I couldn’t do the same thing in Whitefire itself, if I was there, to burn the palace down as Evangeline once asked me to. But this has to be enough for today. I glance at Kilorn behind me, wishing to feel his supporting hand on my back. I doubt I’m safe to be touched right now.

There was a discussion to cause an electromagnetic pulse in the city - we electricons could’ve dismantled all electronic devices in the capital in one go. But we didn’t have the time to train for this, nor was the action agreed on. “It’d affect our devices as well, Mare,” Farley told me. Thus, I’m merely standing on the edge of the roof and taking down every enemy military transport I see. The power plant is hardly in the centre of the capital but those hoping to escape the fights through a bypass will be disappointed.

Despite daybreak, dust limits my sight, raising my worry about the civilians again. But I have to keep focused on the task at hand. It’s exhausting and not as effective as if I was down in the streets but I made my promises – I would make it out alive. I’d return to my family. I won’t offer myself to Maven again.

But please, let me see his corpse at the end of the day.

In the distance, I see the storms created by Ella and Tyton in blue and white. I haven’t called forth a storm myself, but I’m untouchable either way. Electricity buzzes and snaps around me and the metal on the plant’s roof. The voltage hums in the air and if the sight wasn’t warning enough, Kilorn and Ashley, another soldier, keep watch, shouting out to comrades and shooting our enemies. I feel safe with them protecting my back as I hurl lightning from the sky at those foes crossing the streets below me and deep inside, I’m relieved by the distance to Whitefire. Last year on this day, I was a prisoner inside its walls, now I see it crumble, with its demon king trapped inside while I stand above the city, shrouded in lightning and as exalted and powerful as a god. A part of me muses if he can see me from here, but most of all, I hope I’m not cursed to fall. 

@clarafarleybarrow @mareshmallow @calliopexclio @lilyharvord @redqueenfandom @inopinion @hannaharies @breebarrcw @spookysamos @runexandra @asewhj @iris-cygnets @ssingerqueen @red-queen-united @calmareforever @redqueenforever

[crushing83]

Fog on the Barrow-downs

Late(-ish), again! Sorry, @silmread, I got caught up knitting *sheepish face*

“‘And hold to your purpose! North with the wind in the left eye and a blessing on your footsteps! Make haste while the Sun shines!’”

Does this flowery talk mean move in a north-east direction?

“The standing stone was cold, and it cast a long pale shadow that stretched eastward over them. The sun, a pale and watery yellow, was gleaming through the mist just above the west wall of the hollow in which they lay; north, south, and east, beyond the wall the fog was thick, cold and white. The air was silent, heavy and chill. Their ponies were standing crowded together with their heads down.”

Tolkien sure knows how to paint a gloomy (and foreboding) image.

“A Barrow-wight had taken him, and he was probably already under the dreadful spells of the Barrow-wights about which whispered tales spoke. He dared not move, but lay as he found himself: flat on his back upon a cold stone with his hands on his breast.”

What is a barrow-wight? (Did these creatures come up in discussion already?)

“As he lay there, thinking and getting a hold of himself, he noticed all at once that the darkness was slowly giving way: a pale greenish light was growing round him. It did not at first show him what kind of a place he was in, for the light seemed to be coming out of himself, and from the floor beside him, and had not yet reached the roof or wall.”

Why is there light coming out of Frodo?

“Round the corner a long arm was groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam, who was lying nearest, and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.”

So, basically, a barrow-wight is Lurch?

“‘You’ve found yourselves again, out of the deep water. Clothes are but little loss, if you escape from drowning. Be glad, my merry friends, and let the warm sunlight heat now heart and limb! Cast off these cold rags! Run naked on the grass, while Tom goes a-hunting!’”

Run naked on the grass? Is this something people are comfortable doing in the company of others---so comfortable that it's something anyone can suggest to do like it's a perfectly reasonable way to spend time?

“The dark line they had seen was not a line of trees but a line of bushes growing on the edge of a deep dike with a steep wall on the further side. Tom said that it had once been the boundary of a kingdom, but a very long time ago. He seemed to remember something sad about it, and would not say much.”

Where are they at this point? What is this boundary? Is it a territory discussed in the Silmarillion?

“‘Tom will give you good advice, till this day is over (after that your own luck must go with you and guide you): four miles along the Road you’ll come upon a village, Bree under Bree-hill...'”

How do brackets work in dialogue? Is it something the speaker says, but in a "you didn't hear it from me" sort of tone? Is it something the writer is implying to the readers that the characters don't hear? Someone explain this to me, please?

And now... bed. Or, trying to read or write or something for a little while, before bed, anyway. Hope you're all having a good weekend :)

[ciathyzareposts]

The Two Towers: Bored of the Rings

The Ringbearer hasn’t left the same perilous countryside since the game began.

         Lord of the Rings, Vol. II simply doesn’t work. I’m sorry to have reached that conclusion. I had enjoyed the first game well enough and had been looking forward to the sequel, even though I knew there would be no Vol. III. Now I feel that if Interplay was going to leave fans hanging, they should have left them hanging after Vol. I instead of proceeding with this lackluster title.

The yanking around from party to party got worse–laughably worse–after the last session. I began this session with Frodo and Sam, and I’d barely done more than wander through the marsh for five minutes and fight one battle with some orcs, when the game decided it was time to switch the action to Edoras. There, Aragorn et. al. did nothing more than approach the gates of the city before we were off to check in on Merry and Pippin. Then, for some reason, those two had an absurdly long session, ignoring several obvious transition points, culminating in the destruction of Isengard by the Ents. It feels like their story is over before Frodo even got near the Black Gate.

        One of my three parties now has nothing to do but wait.

       But the problems with Vol. II run much deeper than that. It’s core problem is that it is satisfying neither as a Lord of the Rings game nor a standard RPG. If you were a fan of the original books, I can’t imagine that you’d find this game a good representation. The characters are mute and bereft of any personality. Epic moments are rendered in banal, bloodless manual text or on-screen exposition. The little side quests that the developers threw in to lengthen the plot and make it more like a standard RPG simply slow down and confuse the main story.

Even worse–and I don’t often criticize games on these grounds–the graphics fail to evoke any sense of the kind of awe and wonder you should feel when exploring Middle Earth, running up against its most famous landmarks, and meeting its most famous denizens. I wasn’t one of them, but I can imagine a Lord of the Rings fan, having read the book umpteen times, conceiving in his imagination “the green shoulders of the hills” and the “wide wind-swept walls and the gates of Edoras.” Let’s recall how Tolkien describes the Black Gate:

            This was Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass, the entrance to the land of the Enemy. High cliffs lowered upon either side, and thrust forward from its mouth were two sheer hills, black-boned and bare. Upon them stood the Teeth of Mordor, two towers strong and tall. In days long past they were built by the Men of Gondor in their pride and power, after the overthrow of Sauron and his flight, lest he should seek to return to his old realm. But the strength of Gondor failed, and men slept, and for long years the towers stood empty. Then Sauron returned. Now the watch-towers, which had fallen into decay, were repaired, and filled with arms, and garrisoned with ceaseless vigilance. Stony-faced they were, with dark window-holes staring north and east and west, and each window was full of sleepless eyes.

Across the mouth of the pass, from cliff to cliff, the Dark Lord had built a rampart of stone. In it there was a single gate of iron, and upon its battlement sentinels paced unceasingly. Beneath the hills on either side the rock was bored into a hundred caves and maggot-holes: there a host of orcs lurked, ready at a signal to issue forth like black ants going to war. None could pass the Teeth of Mordor and not feel their bite, unless they were summoned by Sauron, or knew the secret passwords that would open the Morannon, the black gate of his land.

             Even I, as a non-fan, have to admit that this is pretty powerful stuff. And here is the Black Gate in-game:

          One of the two Teeth. There’s a mirror about one screen to the east.

          Say what you want about the recent Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War series, but at least they did (in my opinion) graphical justice to the setting. Here, no matter what Tolkien intended, the architectural style favored by the game for just about every building is “aluminum airplane hangar.” The setting’s most fearsome foes and most majestic allies are impressive in neither icon nor portrait. 

         Every building looks like the same temporary shelter with no door.

         As an RPG, meanwhile, the game fails in almost every category. Character development occurs solely at plot intervals and is remarkably impalpable. The skills system, by which characters can actively use certain skills and attributes, goes back to Wasteland but is ill-used here. Among the individuals in each party, you never lack the necessary skill, and it’s always perfectly obvious where to use it. It might as well have happened automatically. The basic equipment list is unexciting, and the combat system–by which you select “attack” and choose from a list of indistinguishable foes–is even less so.

          The game’s relatively boring inventory system.

         Many of these problems were present in Vol. I, too, so you will naturally wonder how I can justify giving that game a relatively high score and a positive review. To be fair, I did levy some of the same criticisms about how the game fared as an RPG, but beyond that . . . I don’t know . . . the game just somehow felt fresher. I recognized that it wasn’t perfect, but it was doing something new and original and I was more willing to give it a chance. I expected the developers to have learned some lessons between Vol. I and Vol. II and thus have corrected some of the engine’s weaknesses. If anything, they went backwards.

The lack of cut scenes is a particular blow. The first game had some original artwork at set intervals that served to keep the characters’ personalities embedded in your mind, and that kept you on track with the source material. (The remake replaced this artwork with scenes from the Ralph Bakshi film, which I liked less, but was still better than nothing.) The fall of Isengard ought to command more than a single paragraph of exposition next to a couple of goofy little icons that are supposed to be Ents.

Feeling as I do, I was going to try to push through to the end of the game for this entry, but I didn’t quite make it. Perhaps I didn’t even come close–I have no idea how this game is going to stretch and warp the book’s events. I’ll recap the progress of the characters, but to avoid exposing you to the same constantly-jarring changes in perspective that I experienced, I’ll just relate each group in turn.

Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Gilglin started at the edge of the Dead Marshes, essentially where they’d started the game 7 hours prior. They’d had the vampire interlude and were looking for something called the “star ruby” before making their way to (or past) the Black Gate. Gollum warned us not to follow the lights in the marsh (I wonder what would have happened if we’d never enlisted him).

           “Do not follow the lights. They lead to . . . [hiss] . . . Cleveland.”

         Systematically exploring the marshes, we soon fell into a barrow in the ground and met an elf named Nendol. He had sworn to never leave the side of a Numenorean named Vorondur who had saved him in combat–a vow that he soon regretted when Vorondur was cursed by undeath and sentenced to wander the marshes as a shade. Nendol asked if I might be able to release him.

We climbed out of the barrow but soon fell into another one where a ghost, in exchange for some rations (which he mimed eating), allowed us to take the Star Ruby. Back at the vampire’s tower, the Star Ruby banished the undead who wanted it. I think it probably would have helped me against the vampire, but who explores the map in such an erratic fashion that they’d find the ruby first? 

          A magic ruby for some Lembas bread that you can’t even eat. Seems fair.

         We found a group of ghosts hanging out in the marshes, and one of them was Vorondur. Since we had already killed the vampire and received the “spirit key,” all we had to do was give it to Vorondur, and he and the other ghosts were able to pass on. Nendol rewarded us with a dagger, some food, a prybar, a shovel, and leather armor. This was good since Gilglin had joined us with no equipment and had had been beating orcs with his fists.

             This was a fun encounter, but some bug put the text all over the place.

          We finally made our way through the marshes and south to the Black Gate. There was one encounter where we had to hide from some passing orcs using the “Sneak” skill. As we approached the gate itself, Gollum gave his canonical speech about we’ll all die that way and he can show us a secret path instead. Just for fun, I pressed forward and got a scripted ending. Reloading, I followed Gollum’s directions, and Frodo’s part of the adventure ended as he crossed the border into Ithilien.

            West of the sea, everything’s cool.

           Merry, Pippin, and their two Ent friends resumed their adventures in Fangorn Forest. They had been tasked with finding two Ents–Leaflock and Skinbark–and watering them so they could rouse themselves and get to the Entmoot. I already knew their locations, and my travel was facilitated by the wandering Ent named Longroot, who will carry the party from place to place if they’re lucky enough to encounter him. Leaflock and Skinbark both responded to Entwater, and both gave the party some kind of password to use, although there was never a place that I used them. I also don’t think I fully explored the ruins or solved the quest involving the seed and the Entwash source. Oh, well.

Back at the Entmoot, the Ents agreed to march on Isengard, and action transitioned to the next map, with Treebeard joining the party (now composed of more Ents than hobbits). Rather than head directly for the fortress, I steered them around the edges and through a mountain pass that led to a village of Dunlendings. They demanded that we leave the village, and when we refused, they attacked us in force and slaughtered us.

           To be fair, they are marching to Isengard, not Dunland.

           On a reload, I went directly to Isengard. As we approached the gates, we got a textual notice that orcs and men were emptying the fortress, marching off to war somewhere, leaving a skeleton force behind.

Since the party had prematurely cleared out a couple of battles in the previous session, we had an easy time on this visit. After a single battle against a few orcs, the game informed me that the Ents were destroying the fortress, Saruman was in hiding, and there wasn’t anything left for Merry and Pippin to do but go wait by the gatehouse for the rest of the Fellowship to show up. I don’t know how the book is paced, but this seemed an awfully early ending to this thread.

           The film version was slightly more epic.

          Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Gandalf had barely set foot into Rohan before they were set upon by a band of Rohirrim and escorted to Edoras. Most of the buildings were empty, the occupants fled, so the party made its way to the Golden Hall. There, as in the book, Hama insisted that we divest our weapons, but he grudgingly allowed Gandalf to keep his staff. I had to play this encounter twice because the first time, I didn’t realize that Gandalf’s “Glamdring” was a sword, not a ring, and I didn’t drop it before entering the hall.

          This felt wrong, and it turned out it was wrong.

          Inside the hall, the dialogue between Gandalf, Grima Wormtongue, and the possessed Theoden played out as in the book. When it was over, I used Gandalf’s staff, Theoden returned to his senses, and Grima fled the hall.

             Paraphrased dialogue from the book.

           In a divergence from the book, it now transpired that Grima and his allies had set traps all around the multi-leveled Golden Hall, and somewhere had secreted three ancient artifacts: Helm’s Horn, the Cup of Rohan, a bridle, and a scepter. Some prophecy said that Rohan’s armies would never be successful lacking these items, so we had to find them before anyone would ride to war. The party had to wander the rooms and corners of the four levels, using “Perception” and “Disarm Trap” frequently, until we recovered all items. (Some notes in a box that Grima left behind gave us clues as to where to find the items.) There was one battle with a spider in the basement. 

            Finding the bridle.

         When we found the scepter in the attic, Saruman oddly appeared and attacked us. We exchanged a few blows and then he disappeared. I don’t know what that was about.

          That was briefly satisfying.

        We briefly met Eowyn in one of the bedrooms and recovered Theoden’s sword, Herugrim, in another, although oddly the game wouldn’t let us give it to him. A found note gave a clue as to a side-quest: Saruman had tasked Grima with finding some magical gauntlets near Helm’s Deep. We looted some magic armor and a magic sword from the armory, which turned out to be fortunate because when we left the Golden Hall, the game said that Grima had stolen Anduril in his flight.

    I’m surprised that Eowyn won’t join the party. Shoot–maybe I didn’t try.

               When the party left the hall, the Rohirrim were yelling things like “For the Mark!” and “Forth Eorlingas!,” so I assume they’re on the move. I end this session with Aragorn and company exploring the area surrounding Edoras to see if they can recover Anduril and/or meet up with the hobbits at Isengard.

           Is Anduril even supposed to be reforged yet?

         Having not made it past the first 40% of Lord of the Rings, I’m extremely fuzzy on where this installment is likely to end. (Fuzzy and slightly curious; in fact, vague curiosity about how this game ends is really all I have left to look forward to.) I think I remember someone telling me that the film of The Two Towers ends well before its point in the book, but I could be wrong. As far as I know, Merry and Pippin have nothing left to do. Aragorn and his party still have to go to Helm’s Deep, which I assume will be the climax of the game.” As for Frodo and Sam, I suspect they need to meet Faramir (though I understand events play out very different in the book than in the films) and then find the secret tunnel. Will they run into Shelob? I guess we’ll soon see. One more entry should do it.

Time so far: 12 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-two-towers-bored-of-the-rings/

[oselatra]

Barbershops, books and boogers

How an expat Hall High graduate is creating an early literacy movement back home.

Alvin Irby's big idea started with a haircut. As he sat in a barbershop across from P.S. 069 in the Bronx, N.Y., where he taught first grade from 2008 to 2010, one of his students walked in. "He sat down, and he was just sitting there," Irby said. Irby might not have even thought much about it, except that the student in question was his own, and one he knew would have been well served to spend that idle time with his head in a book. He remembers wishing he had a children's book to give him. And then it hit him. What if there was a bookshelf in the barbershop?

That epiphany turned into a plan: Barbershop Books. Using funds and resources from organizations like The Neubauer Family Foundation, Campaign for Black Male Achievement, the Citizens Committee for New York City and The Chasdrew Fund, Irby and his team launched the program at Denny Moe's Superstar Barber Shop in Manhattan, then Big Russ Barber Shop down the street, then Jesse's Barber Shop in the Bronx. Now there are more than a dozen barbershops with books in New York as well as others in Florida, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and Texas. The formula is simple: identify barbershops with the room, inclination and clientele to support a child-friendly reading space, and put in bookshelves. Barbershop Books has garnered praise from the likes of TV series "Reading Rainbow" and actors and rappers Ice Cube and Killer Mike.

Irby, a 2003 graduate of Little Rock Hall High School, began to get attention in local news stories earlier this year, when the National Book Foundation awarded him its Innovations in Reading Prize of $10,000. With help from former Hall and Grinnell College classmate state Rep. Charles Blake (D-Little Rock), Irby plans to direct those funds toward implementing the program in a growing number of locations — including 10 barbershops in Little Rock and North Little Rock.

One of them, Salon 11.13, sits at 3925 John Barrow Road, south of Interstate 630. Parkview Arts & Science Magnet High School and the Sidney S. McMath Library are on that stretch of roadway, but otherwise, it's dotted with a steadily alternating pattern of liquor stores and churches. The sign outside the salon is sleek, embossed with the slogan "Where YOUR hair is OUR business." There's an old-fashioned barbershop pole alongside those words, the kind with the candy cane stripes and the silver top. It's the lone symbol of barbershops past; all else is new and spotless, from the crisp landscaping to the mixed stone and brick exterior of the building. Inside, owner Lawrence Anderson — whose November birthday gives the shop its name — stood with clippers in hand, making his way up the back of client David Mobley's scalp, starting from the neck and working upward.

"I've been cutting Dave's hair about 10, 12 years," Anderson recalled. Somewhere in Anderson's memory bank, there's a list of clients and their tenures. He remembers how long they've been sitting in his chairs, and which ones have followed him from shop to shop. When you find a barber you trust, Mobley said, you stick with the routine.

"I do this every Thursday at 12. I used to do it twice a week —"

"Twice a month," Anderson corrected him.

"Twice a month," Mobley repeated. "And," gesturing to Anderson, "he would be like, 'You can't be going anywhere and not having your hair cut every week.' "

Anderson cuts in. "My motto is: You should never look like you just got a hair cut. You should never look like you need a hair cut. You should just always have a hair cut. If you look like you just had a hair cut, that means you waited too long before you got it."

Anderson, who's lived in Central Arkansas his whole life, spends much of his time outside the barbershop coaching sixth-grade basketball and fifth- and sixth-grade football at Episcopal Collegiate School.

Anderson gestured to a young man in the anteroom. "Just to mess with him, I'm gonna tell you that the kid sitting up there in front is one of the kids I used to try to beat," Anderson said. He described a reconnaissance mission he made to suss out the future opponent's tactics. The "kid" was Donavan Smith, 17. He's a student at Little Rock Christian Academy. He's large and athletic, and he'd been silent until now, affirming Anderson's version of the tale to me at intervals with one soft-spoken "yes, ma'am" after another.

Anderson's spying on Smith in middle school, the story goes, was intercepted by Smith's mother and grandmother who, Anderson said with a laugh, "tried to attack me 'cause I was scoutin' their team. They told me, 'You're not playing, so go ahead and get out.' That's how I got him as a client." Anderson came out unscathed, with another head of hair to trim.

***

Irby's resume boasts two master's degrees and a litany of titles like "Education Director, Boys Club of New York." He's had years of experience teaching in public, private and charter schools. His work encouraging people to read books, though, predates those credentials. When he ran for Student Council president of Hall High in his senior year, his platform was "It Takes 2," a reading program he designed after becoming disillusioned with the curriculum in his 10th-grade English class.

"After a semester," he said, "the only thing I'd learned was that my teacher thought O.J. was innocent." He was coasting, with a near-perfect grade in the class, but he was bored out of his mind. After that semester, Hall allowed him to transfer to a pre-AP class where he got his first taste of racial inequities in the public school system. "I just remember walking into the class," he said, "and the first question that popped into my mind was, 'Where did all these white people come from?' In my regular class, it was all black and Latino students."

He devoured "The Great Gatsby" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and, fueled by a growing disenchantment with the disparity in reading level expectations, conducted a survey of 200 of his classmates to gauge reading habits across the school. He met with the community-relations manager for the Little Rock Barnes & Noble, who offered him $810 in the form of in-store gift cards for his peers to use toward extra-curricular reading. One day, he recalled, he was waiting in line to buy candy after school when his principal appeared beside him and said, "You know, Alvin, you're gonna be a better principal than I ever was." He responded with a "Never."

"But you know, I went off to college," Irby said, "and I took one education course and I couldn't sleep at night. My brain wouldn't turn off. I'd think about all the things I would do if I had a classroom. And that's when I decided to stop running from what I think has been my calling all along, which is to help inspire people and children to fall in love with learning."

***

Even before the bookshelves have been installed at Salon 11.13, people in the community have already begun dropping off books of their own choosing; Anderson has short, tidy stacks of titles — among them, Margaret Musgrove's "Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions" and Anna Kosof's biography of Jesse Jackson. As well intentioned as those donations are, Irby and Blake aren't likely to use those titles in this particular program. In fact, the list of approved titles for Barbershop Books is squarely focused on the program's targeted audience, kids ages 4 to 8: Dav Pilkey's "The Adventures of Captain Underpants," Ezra Jack Keats' "The Snowy Day," Sonia Sanders' "LEGO City: Calling All Cars!"

To better understand why Irby's vision doesn't call for reading spaces brimming with copies of the "March" trilogy or illustrated histories of, say, Frederick Douglass or Shirley Chisholm, it's helpful to note the subject matter of the book Irby authored himself: boogers. His debut, "Gross Greg," is a rhyming picture book about a boy who loves to eat his boogers, published last September with pop-off-the-page illustrations by Kelvin Ntukula. (Would that boogers glittered like green "Ghostbusters" slime in the real world!) On the cover, a boy in sun-and-moon pajamas holds his left index finger up, perfectly poised to transfer the gleaming green blob from his fingertip to his open mouth. Behind him, his sister — also in pajamas — points at him, horrified. The first few lines of "Gross Greg" read like this:

"Bam! Bam! Bam! Greg hears three loud knocks on his bedroom door.

Now Greg knows he can't sleep anymore.

'Out of bed!' says his mom with a shout.

We'll be late for school. There's no time to pout.'

'Ahhhhhhhhh.' With a loud yawn, he's up on his feet.

Greg's eyes are still sleepy, but he wants something to eat."

Reviews posted on Irby's website range from "My son can't put it down, and he's 23" to one from a New York City first-grade student identified as Nathaly, who said, "I enjoyed your story Gross Greg because it was very silly. Can you make more books like Gross Greg eats worms and Gross Greg eats his homework? You are ready to make more books," she declared. And, gratuitously outing her own "Greg," she added, "My brother eats his boogers."

Far too often, Irby said, "the children's books that feature black children often deal with these very serious topics — civil rights, for example. 'Gross Greg' is kind of my effort to combat that kind of oppression narrative that's so often the case when it comes to children's books that have black main characters. ... To me, creating 'Gross Greg' was about creating a character who depicts just being a kid, and this is something that really challenges a lot of adults and educators. ... There are books that will get kids excited about reading, but they may not be the books that you're currently using or that you might even consider using." What he's found from his travels to conferences and symposiums on early literacy around the country, he said, "is that a lot of adults are more concerned about what they like than what will inspire kids to fall in love with reading."

Irby could just as well add science to that, too. "Gross Greg" has a set of online games adjacent to the story, teaching kids how to read graphs ("How many kids think mustard-covered pancakes is the grossest thing?"), how to think about fractions ("Color in 1/4 boogers!") and how to tell time ("Show the time on the clock when Greg ate his boogers!")

It should be said that Irby probably thinks a lot about igniting a spark with audiences, and not just in the context of the classroom. He moonlights as a stand-up comic. On his "other" resume, the title of "comedian" is sandwiched between "educator" and "entrepreneur." Irby was a finalist in the 2015 StandUp NBC Competition, and spent time the following year giving performances at colleges in Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Most recently, he's recruited some of his comedy peers to perform for "Fresh Fade Comedy," a fundraiser for Barbershop Books.

"Gross Greg," for its author, is about giving kids room to be goofy. It's about "affirming the humanity of children," he said. "I know that might sound weird to think of a book about boogers affirming somebody's humanity. When you think about the media, though, and the way black boys are often depicted in public spaces, they often are not allowed to be children. They have the whole world on their shoulders," he said, "because everybody is looking at them expecting them to do this or do that. ... They're being suspended and expelled from preschools at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts. They're being shot down in the streets because somebody thinks that a 10-year-old is a 16-year-old, or an 18-year-old."

Over at Salon 11.13, Donavan rested his chin on his chest, allowing Anderson to clip, then brush the nape of his neck. "You remember earlier today when you called me and I wasn't here?" Anderson asked. I nodded. He gestured to Donavan. "I was helping him jump his car off because he didn't know how to do it." I asked Donavan why, faced with a dead battery on a hot day in late June, it was Anderson he called. "I knew he could fix something like that. And I trust him," he said.

***

Like the shop in the Bronx where Irby's Barbershop Books idea was born, New Tyler Barber College in North Little Rock sits across from an elementary school. It's a labyrinth of classrooms and workstations, and the walls are lined with visual aids that span disciplines: anatomy, geometry, health and hygiene, chemistry and conduct. Owner/operator and barber Ricky Bryant runs the place, and has since the '90s, when his father, Daniel, developed colon cancer. Bryant, who was working hair shows as a platform artist for the Andis clipper company in North Carolina, returned to Arkansas and stepped into the family business. He spent his childhood working with his father at Smith Barbershop on Washington Avenue in North Little Rock, "folding towels, linens, whatever needed to be done," he said, and at New Tyler after his father founded the school in 1979.

Bryant practically emanates pragmatism and discipline, so it didn't come as a shock when he said he starts his day at New Tyler at 6:45 a.m. "My dad always told me, 'If you get here early and the water line's busted, you might get it fixed before anyone walks in the door.' "

Like Anderson, Bryant didn't need a lot of convincing after hearing the pitch for Barbershop Books. "I remember the annual Barber Board meeting," he said. "Growing up, and being here since '79, I've had kids come in that know me, whose parents I've never seen. They walk to school, maybe come in here to buy a snack or come get a haircut by themselves." He recounted Irby's moment of inspiration, noting the spot in the school's reception area where the elementary students from across the street tend to sit and wait. "Most of the older kids have a phone," he said, "but the younger kids are just sitting there."

***

The next day at Salon 11.13, Charles Blake's two boys are huddled together in the anteroom. At first, they want the same book about the L.A. Lakers. That subsides. Maybe it was a little premature for them to pick up that particular one; at one point, it was being read upside down. Blake, who was there to get his hair cut, chimed in. "That's how you know it's that fake reading," he said. "When the book is upside down."

In 2010, a D.C.-based public school advocacy group called the Council of the Great City Schools released a report, "A Call For Change," based on 2009 statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Among other things, the study concluded that only around 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys were proficient in reading. Irby's team rallies behind a close inverse of that statistic, quoted on the Barbershop Books website: "85 percent of America's black male fourth-grade students are not proficient in reading."

When people hear that statistic, Irby said, "a lot of times there's blame on the kid. 'The kid needs to put down this, they need to do this.' What I like to ask people is, 'What cultural factors, what social cues are present in their lives that will lead them to conclude that reading is something they should do?' " Put simply, he said, if you want to get kids to read a book, read a book yourself. "If you don't have any men in your life who are modeling reading for you, if none of your friends are reading, if none of the books you like are being used for instructional purposes at school," he asked, "then why would you conclude that you are a reader?"

Barbershop Books aims, in Irby's words, to "help young black boys and other boys of color identify as readers by connecting books to a male-centered space and by involving men and boys in those early reading experiences."

The word "identity" rolls across Irby's tongue warmly, and often. It's one he sees as the core of this program and, more broadly, at the core of a successful education system. What's more, it's an approach he believes has the potential to bear more fruit than teaching methods that emphasize skills. "I really try to push people to, instead of focusing on skills — and the skills a child doesn't have ... to use an asset-based approach instead of a deficit-based approach," he said. "To ask, 'What are they interested in? What are the things that make them laugh? What are the things that are important to them?' Then, let's see if we can connect reading to those things." For many of the children Irby's taught, he said, "their first and early reading experiences in schools are them doing some sort of assessment where a teacher is telling them all the letters they don't know, all the letter sounds they don't know, all the words they don't know. What kind of effect do you think that will have on their reading identity?" The real mark of progress, Irby observed, is when kids read in situations where reading is not required. "A lot of kids — and I'm sure this is the case in Little Rock — as soon as the school day ends, as soon as the school year ends, they do not touch books," he said. "That has to do with identity, not reading skills. If a kid identifies as a reader, then they're a reader whether school is happening or not."

As of now, there are 59 barbershops listed on the nonprofit's website as part of the program, and that number doesn't include the 10 reading spaces slated for implementation in Central Arkansas, which also include the Goodfellas Barbershops on Asher Avenue, Main Street, Green Mountain Drive and Stagecoach Road; World Champion on Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive; Skillz Barber Shop on 12th Street, Headz Up Barber Shop on Geyer Springs Road and The Hair Show on Kiehl Avenue in Sherwood. When making choices about additions to the program, Irby considers a few criteria. "We want barbershops who have at least 40 kids a month coming in. We also want to have the space to accommodate the bookshelves, and we want the barbershop owners or managers to support, to be willing to host it. That's pretty much it." Irby and Blake plan to schedule a session in mentorship training, likely at St. Mark Baptist Church, where both Blake and Lawrence attend services. "There are thousands of barbershops in black communities across the country," Irby said, "and there are also a number of barbershops that serve primarily Spanish-speaking clientele, who I think would absolutely benefit from the Barbershop Books program."

To recommend a book, volunteer to sponsor a reading space or find out more about the Barbershop Books program, visit barbershopbooks.org.

Barbershops, books and boogers

[claudecat17]

Deep Ellum and the Blues

Here’s our own lovable Marxist Tom’s guest post, as promised last week.

The wrong side of the tracks in Dallas, Texas, a blues hot spot like many others through the years. It’s important to look beyond and behind the myth that the blues is strictly a Mississippi Delta to Chicago phenomenon. Lots of other locales added their own flavors to the vast breadth of music - the blues - that’s informed just about everything that’s come along since. Enjoy! And thanks again Tom!

If you go down to Deep Elem ... Deep Ellum, Texas, 1920s, a rough section of Dallas full of pool halls and juke joints. Leadbelly also sang about it in “Take a Whiff on Me (Cocaine Habit Blues)”, which Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions (a mid-60′s Grateful Dead precursor), among many others, covered.

Deep Ellum is a place- or was. It existed as one of the first Freedman Towns that, in a short period of time, became the City of Dallas, Texas. This was immediately following the Civil War when the former slaves arrived in the area, along with the railroads, augmenting the already large number of African-Americans in the state. A Texas law (enacted in 1846), making public land property of the state, would eventually make land developers the most powerful- and wealthiest –class in the region and bring about the demise of Deep Ellum, a place that nurtured a distinctive variant of blues music.

The Grateful Dead made the tune, “Deep Ellum Blues”, a staple of theirs and the song is played by everyone from Bob Weir to the Levon Helm Band to Roseanne Cash and on and on. Not very many know it’s origins in a disappeared enclave of the old cotton economy, and the creative genius of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Bill Neely, Blind Willie Johnson and the many others who honed their skills in the Texas of early 20th century America.

Recognition of the early authors of the blues has been a long process; the history of the places and times that produced them is vastly unrecognized and would help clarify what the blues has been- and continues to be –all about. Deep Ellum is one of those places; its importance lies in how it came to be,  what destroyed it and how it came to be again.

Dallas never made anything... except money. It was, and still is in many respects, a city that facilitates: land development and speculation, financial investment schemes; “a place where products from elsewhere are financed, brokered and transported”. First leather and buffalo hides, followed by cotton then oil and technology. Lyndon Johnson’s money was from land speculation. This wealth dominated Dallas’ development as the city expanded, eventually exploding in the years during and after WWII. As the historian A.C. Greene noted, “…no city has been so controlled in its civic and municipal directions by land development, as has Dallas.”

Deep Ellum was in the path of Dallas’ development dreams. It had grown from a loose collection of shacks, small farms, shotgun houses and shops into the center of African-American entertainment and cultural life for the Southwest. If St. Louis is the gateway to the American west, Dallas is the first and most important stop.

Grouped around a central transshipment hub of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, Deep Ellum (named for its chief artery, Elm Street) was the intersection of black blues and white country and western music by the 1930’s and ‘40’s. The song “Deep Ellum Blues” is emblematic of that cultural isotope, sometimes credited to Bill Neely and recorded for the first time by the Cofer Brothers - which goes a long way toward explaining its popularity with a mostly white audience today. But its original provenance has been forgotten under the pavement of the North Central Expressway. The engine of a development without conscience obscures a great deal.

By the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, a young Ray Charles was playing the Empire Room and Duke Ellington would stay in the Powell Hotel. Theaters, nightclubs, businesses all thrived and musicians and workers, farmers, sharecroppers, maids who worked in the wealthy white neighborhoods of North Dallas, all made their way to Central Avenue and its surrounding streets in the heart of Deep Ellum.

They weren’t alone. The white working class made their way there too, for the music and night life. In the 19th century, Doc Holliday could be found filling cavities there by day and gambling at night, until being run out of town for shooting a local notable. In the 1930’s, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow enjoyed Deep Ellum’s hospitality- machine guns at the ready. In the fiercely segregated South, Deep Ellum at night was a heady jumble of black, white and latino having- by most accounts -one hell of a good time together. Then the sun came up and all would scatter, either to an emerging North Dallas or back to the cotton fields that still edged the outskirts of Main Street’s terminus.

“Deep Ellum Blues” is a record of the era, a time and place where, at least after sunset, Jim Crow didn’t have the last word. So it was left to highway construction and, perversely, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka to rearrange the face of Dallas and turn Deep Ellum into a soon forgotten relic. Desegregation became an opportunity for developers. Urban sprawl, nowhere more visible than in the Southwest, was fueled by the mad rush of white flight from the central cities to the suburbs, and highways paved over the paths of least resistance to get them there. The poor, mostly black, neighborhoods like Deep Ellum were soon ribbons of macadam ferrying those who could afford it from their jobs downtown to their new homes in the burbs. Those who were left behind congregated into the soon to be inner city slums that have become so familiar across the urban landscape.

Re-segregation was a factor of civil rights legislation that didn’t have a guarantee of economic equality to leaven it. Dallas and Deep Ellum is just one example. The unintended consequences of one reform can lead to reproducing, in a new guise, the very conditions that made reform necessary. Deep Ellum itself had been a result of the freed slaves working to create economic opportunity and social community from the wreckage of civil war, and place them on an equal footing with whites in the south. Jim Crow saw to it that their efforts would be in isolation from their natural allies in the white working class. The Blues is a signifier of that long struggle towards resolving, once and forever, the unequal distribution of rights and freedoms that today are once again on the minds of us all.

Dallas was initially more an association of Freedman’s towns than anything else, housing the newly arriving railroad workers and sharecroppers from an increasingly hostile Mississippi delta and the depression wracked cities of the older South. With them came original African rhythms and the hybrid Creole of New Orleans to form a distinctive sound. Closely associated with the railroads, they combined to form a music of restless movement and unpredictable change. Leadbelly especially, personified this sound when he gave his voice to “Rock Island Line”, “Bourgeois Blues”, “Pick a Bale of Cotton”, “Silvy” and so on. Janis Joplin said of him simply, “Leadbelly first”. Josh White called him the perfect bluesman; “…bigger than all of us because he covered all the ground from blues to folk without ever falling down”. He exemplified the unity of black and white workers in the union movement and championed the cause of dust bowl farmers and prison inmates alike.

He had, with his simple verse, placed the onus for black and white frustrations where it properly belonged- directly in the lap of a class above and beyond the everyday strivings of working people’s lives. He knew all about exploitation and he recognized the source as a wedge between blacks and whites that would forever labor to keep them separate. His blues sought to illuminate the tragedy of that distance.

Hearing the sounds of The Dead, The Flying Burrito Brothers; even Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings and the rest of Texas inflected roots music, links us back to an earlier time. Then it was Marvin Montgomery and Dick Reinhart and Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys, having picked up their version of blues rhythms from Deep Ellum clubs, who would influence the generations to come. A musical history of forgotten pasts, that haven’t really passed at all.

Today Deep Ellum is more an amalgam of curated pasts than community of souls. Museums, yuppie bars and recreations of a sanitized history stand in for a rougher reality. Development and eight lane highways can cover up old neighborhoods, but they can’t stave off what, in the end and however imperfectly, binds us.  Music, and the Blues in particular, just won’t allow it. There is just too much America in it- our history and collective soul is written there. It has a staying power because its simplicity of form allows for such a broad expression of hope, joy, fear, despair, re-birth. There is a redemptive quality in it that identifies our needs as necessary human practice, not as a punishable offense. And that’s what informs our desire for an ever better nation; loves’ quality of bestowing redemption transcends the personal, embracing even the most hapless outsider.

Deep Ellum was, and remains, a geographical place and a spiritual presence, if we only care to look for it.

--------------------------------

Some musical selections chosen by Tom to accompany this piece (as were the photos, though I added the Leadbelly one). Rather than intersperse them willy nilly, I figured it would be easier to foist ‘em down here:

I really like this one. Arizona Dranes was a very early gospel singer, someone I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now:

The great Blind Willie Johnson, another giant of black music. He would not have been happy to be lumped into the blues category:

Mr. Belly:

No relation to those Lynyrd Skynyrd cats:

-------------------------------- Link to past posts, faster than the top-right icon thingie: https://disqus.com/home/forum/claudecatsplace/recent/ --------------------------------

[rangers-are-cool-moved]

❝ i’ll do as i choose and go as i please. ❞   From Seldo!

  A raised eyebrow was the young woman’s only response as she crouched to study some tracks. “Never said you couldn’t. There are just some places you probably shouldn’t go, unless you like the Dead and the Dead like you.”   There was a reason why the Lord of Imladris had asked this particular Ranger to accompany the younger elf. And it wasn’t just because of her neutrality. Her knowledge of both the Barrow-downs and the Old Forest would be useful.

@roquenxnar