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bending_sickleWord Count: 2961
Novel Progress: Chapter 24. Almost a third of the way through the general story, wha-hey!
Current Emotion: I Thought I Was Going To Chill
53244 / 50000 words. 106% done!
* Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Novel Progress: Chapter 24. Almost a third of the way through the general story, wha-hey!
Current Emotion: I Thought I Was Going To Chill
The pine tree she is in shudders, sways, then, almost gracefully, leans back and back and back to the song of breaking branches and ripping roots. It is dizzying, how the world tilts to the side, and although it feels like the slow fall will never stop, it does, with the deafening crash of branches snapping as they meet with another tree. Grace’s hold slips and her body swings around so she’s clinging to the underside of the tree trunk where before she had been wrapped around it, sitting on a branch. Pine needles push and scrape against her arms, legs, her face, and get trapped in her hair, pulling it sharply.
Around her, she hears Bilbo’s sharp cry and the snap of a branch, then, another, slightly lower, mixed in with Gloin’s long stream of a curse. The tree trunk shudders and bounces as the heavy thump of boots against wood comes closer, and Grace looks up to see Thorin running along the slanted tree trunk, bent far forward to fight the pull of gravity and dodging branches. When he reaches her, he leans down and grabs her by the waist, fingers catching on belt loops, and pulls her up until she’s lying on the tree trunk between his boots, gasping and lacing her fingers together around the trunk.
“What possessed you to set the forest on fire?” he shouted up at Gandalf. “Have you a plan, or do you mean to make burned dwarves of us all?”
“A little patience, if you please,” called down the wizard from his precarious perch at the tip of the tree.
“Patience,” echoes Thorin. His hand presses tightly against Grace’s back, as if she might fall any second. “We haven’t the time for patience,” he mutters to himself.
* Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
