Escape Interlude 9: Tulkas

"Where's my bear?" thought Tulkas, although to be honest, 'thinking' wasn't quite the right word for the process occurring in Tulkas's brain. "Someone has killed my bear!" the non-thought continued. "Someone must pay for killing my bear!"

He was suddenly distracted from not thinking about his bear by a shout from Olórin, the words of which went in one ear and straight out of the other, but it had been something about Kinslaying, and preventing a Kinslaying was, after all, the purpose of his mission. Tulkas looked carefully at the Elves in front of him and realised that many of them were waving swords in the air. This was a bad sign! Elves used swords for fighting, and fighting quite naturally lead to killing, but why did they have swords at all? Was this fight planned?

Yet there was something else... yes, a bear, a beautiful white bear from the far north that had taken weeks to find. Where was it? Where was it? Aha! Of course! It was dead. A Kinslayer had murdered it. Now what Olórin was saying made sense: the kinslayers who had killed his bear were here. They were here, but Olórin was pointing to the top of the tower, waving his hand around, and there was no-one there. Olórin was mistaken, then, which wasn't so strange - after all, he was only a Maia - and the kinslayers were before him, now taking a few experimental swings at each other with their swords.

Slowly and painfully a recollection dragged itself from the depths of Tulkas's mind, although to be honest 'mind' wasn't quite the right word, and nor was the non-mind anything other than shallow. In the memory he saw himself holding two Elves at arms length, one with golden hair and the other with hair of a colour that eluded him. Were they the killers? Yes, he rather supposed that they must be, given that before Olórin had distracted him he was quite clearly intent on depriving the two of their freedom. Where had they gone?