Chapter 18: The Muffins of Sedariel
As you might expect, this one is packed with Exit 57 and Strangers With Candy references. Props to stellar_dust for proofreading and suggestions.
The Lord of the Reports:
The Fellowship of the Tie
Book II, Chapter 18:
The Muffins of Sedariel
When all the guests were seated before his chair the Lord Dinelloborn looked at them again. "Okay, how come there are only eight of you? I thought there were supposed to be nine. Amy, didn't we hear there were going to be nine?"
"We definitely did," said the Lady Sedariel. "Where's Lewis?" Her voice was clear and musical, but without notice or provocation she often slipped into a harsh and grating croak, her fair features contorting into a similarly wretched parody of themselves. "If he's not here, I can't make my honey pie. Where did the bastard get to?"
The entire Company looked at Jonagorn.
"Um," said the Stranger. "Funny story there, actually. Well, not so much 'funny'. More sort of 'heartbreakingly tragic'. He didn't make it out of Moria, is what I'm saying."
Then in a halting voice he recounted all that had happened since they left RSU, of the spies of Sau'reilly in the mountains, and the downfall of Studio Moria, and the attack from the creature in the depths. "An evil of the Ancient Ways of Thinking it seemed, such as I have never seen before. It was both hateful and narrow-minded, intolerant and oppressive."
"It was a Falrog," said Stepholas, "of all elf-banes most obnoxious."
"Great!" cried Dinelloborn, throwing up his hands. "Just great. How do you plan on finishing this quest without Lewis? We may as well give up. Throw in the towel. Go home."
"No," said Jonagorn. "I grieve, but I do not despair."
"Smart man," said Sedariel gravely. "Hope remains. You can still reach for the stars -- as long as you reach for the lowest ones you can." Again her voice shifted. "Unless, of course, one of you is a snitch."
And with that word she held them with her eyes, and in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Stepholas could return her gaze for long. It didn't help that she was slightly cross-eyed, and had a disconcerting way of rapidly winking one eye after the other. Ed quickly blushed and hung his head.
At length the Lady Sedariel released them from her eyes, and she smiled prettily once more. "You've been through far too much lately," said she. "We can talk more about the quest later on. In the meantime, who wants cake?"
"Will you serve it covered in sprinkles?" asked Stevli.
That night the Fellowship slept on the ground, much to the satisfaction of the hobbits, and listened to the songs of elves in the trees.
"What are they saying?" asked Sam.
"I'm not going to translate for you," snapped Stepholas. "This is Chicagórien. Speak Elvish."
"They're singing about Lewis," said Jason. "I can understand some of it. Not much point in translating, though. It's mostly swear words."
"Swearing about how Lewis was fucking awesome, I hope," said Rob.
"Yeah, pretty much."
From then the talk turned to the day's journey, and to the Lord and the Lady. "What were you blushing for, Ed?" said Rob. "Feeling guilty about something? Planning to steal one of my blankets tonight, maybe?"
"Why would I be thinking about your blankets?" demanded Ed, in no mood for jest. "If you must know, she seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire. As if she were scanning me with some kind of . . . home-ometer. And I didn't like it at all."
"That's funny," said Rob. "Almost exactly what I felt myself; only, well, only nothing, so shut up!"
All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he or she had been offered a choice between the treacherous road ahead and something greatly desired that could only be gotten by turning aside. (All but Stevli, who insisted that his must have been some kind of fluke. "I mean, come on, I had a vision in which I was a forty-year-old virgin and the Lady Sedariel was a fortysomething ex-whore! How could that possibly make any sense?")
"And on top of that," said Stepholas, "it seemed like if I did decide to cut and run -- which I would never do, of course, but if I did -- nobody else would know."
As for Jason, he would not speak, though Kilbornomir pressed him with questions. "She looked at you an awfully long time, Tie-bearer," he said.
"Dude," said Jason, "lay off, all right?"
"All right, all right. But be careful. I'm not too sure about this elf babe."
"You can lay off of her, too," said Stevli.
They remained some days in Chicagórien, so far as they could tell or remember. Stepholas was away much with the Lord Dinelloborn and the other Elven-folk, and after the first night he did not sleep with the other companions, though he returned to eat and talk with them. When asked what what sort of business they got up to, his only reply was, "Befriending each other."
Often he took Stevli with him, and the others wondered at this change. But all attempts to broach the topic with any of the three were invariably met with frustrated shrieks of "Shut up! Your voice is like a Warg picking at my brain!"
One evening Jason and Sam were walking together in the cool twilight when they saw the Lady Sedariel approaching. She was clad all in white, though her skirt billowed out from the many layers of pink tulle crowded beneath it. She spoke no word, but beckoned to them.
Jason moved to follow, but his companion hesitated. "Come on, Sam," he urged. "You're the one who always wanted to see elves."
"I've seen them," protested Sam. "They're as hot as they say, but nothing ever comes of it." But she followed him anyway.
Sedariel led them down a long flight of steps into a deep green hollow in which was an enclosed garden. No trees grew there; it lay open to the sky. At the bottom, upon a low pedestal carved with the figures of rabbits, sat a squat black oven. Donning a set of polka-dotted mitts, the Lady opened the door, and from it she drew a tray.
"Here are the Muffins of Sedariel," she said. "I have brought you here so that you may eat them, if you will."
"What happens if we do?" asked Jason cautiously.
"Even the wisest cannot tell," said the Lady in a grave voice. "But I mixed the dough in the same bowl that I used to make a batch of the glint earlier, so it'll probably get pret-ty wild, if you know what I mean."
Still Jason hesitated.
"I'll try one," spoke up Sam. "What'samatter, Jason? Chicken?"
"Never let it be said that J-Squared backed down from a challenge," Jason shot back. "Hit me up too, Lady."
Sedariel gave them each one of the warm and steaming muffins. Jason took a great bite.
At once the veil of night seemed to lift, and the garden about him became very bright and intensely colored. A figure walked past, whose bearing reminded Jason somewhat of Lewis; but he was dressed all in white, and bore some sort of gigantic mallet. Before he could make sense of this, the backdrop had the audacity to melt altogether.
"Hey!" cried Sam from beside him. "They've blown up a dam in the Shire! The whole thing's flooded! We have to go home and help them!"
Turning to Sam, Jason saw that she had taken it into her head to change herself into a large, pink dragon wearing a three-piece suit and a straw boater. "Don't worry," he said, "it isn't real. At least, I don't think it's real. Sedariel, is this real?"
"Well," said the Lady evasively. "Real is relative, you know."
"Is it as real as the beast with a hundred eyes?" demanded Sam.
"Ah! That's a very good example! Yes. Everything you're seeing is as real as the beast with a hundred eyes."
Jason couldn't see any beast, which made him feel much better about the way the ground had developed holes out of which were pouring fanged peanut brittle. But then everything went dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Jason looked into emptiness.
In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye, lidless and rimmed with fire, its catlike pupil roving this way and that. The Tie that hung loosely about Jason's neck grew heavy as it searched.
"That's enough!" exclaimed Sedariel, and a cold splash of water across Jason's face shocked him to his senses again. The clearing reassembled itself in the proper order, and the few remaining polka-dotted cockroaches skittered away in embarrassment.
"We have to go home," moaned Sam. She was dripping wet, but, mercifully, no longer pink or scaly. "We've got to save the town . . . ."
"Nothing you can do at home will help," the Lady replied. "It's not like the Dark Lord will be dissuaded if you throw a parade. The only way to save your Shire is to keep that Eye from finding what it seeks."
Jason, whose mind had been on that last of his visions, gave a guilty start. "How did you know what I saw?" he asked, trying without success to avoid imagining the Lady without her skirt.
Sedariel began to undo the top button of her blouse. "Because the same thing is on my mind."
Too awestruck was Jason even to make a token protest on Sam's behalf. But the Lady only undid a few buttons more before she stopped, and slipped a fuzzy grey tie from its hiding place beneath her collar.
"This is Dustya, the Tie of Rabbitant," said she. "The Dark Lord has no idea. Oh, he has his suspicions, but he doesn't know. Not yet."
Jason gazed at her tie with understanding, if not a little disappointment. "Look, do you want the One Tie?" he asked abruptly, drawing it from beneath his shirt and holding it out. "Because if you ask me for it, I will totally give it to you."
Sedariel giggled. "You're a sweetheart," she said, patting Jason's cheek. "But I never wanted to be an important actor on the world stage. I'm just going to go West, and hang out with Paul, and bake my cupcakes and raise my rabbits, and probably be forgotten in a couple of ages."
A sadder fate Jason could hardly imagine: not only for the charming Lady, but for the Middle-america that would forget her.
"Can I ask one thing?" he said. "Since I'm a Tie-bearer, how come I can't do your mind-reading trick?"
"You haven't tried," replied Sedariel sensibly. "Don't! Tie use will ruin your life. Trust me. I'm a user myself. And you're already seeing more things than you would otherwise. Sam, did you see my Tie?"
"Lady, I have no idea what you're talking about," Sam answered. "Does this mean you're not going to take off anything else?"
Now featuring footnotes. See also: list of previous chapters.
The Lord of the Reports:
The Fellowship of the Tie
Book II, Chapter 18:
The Muffins of Sedariel
When all the guests were seated before his chair the Lord Dinelloborn looked at them again. "Okay, how come there are only eight of you? I thought there were supposed to be nine. Amy, didn't we hear there were going to be nine?"
"We definitely did," said the Lady Sedariel. "Where's Lewis?" Her voice was clear and musical, but without notice or provocation she often slipped into a harsh and grating croak, her fair features contorting into a similarly wretched parody of themselves. "If he's not here, I can't make my honey pie. Where did the bastard get to?"
The entire Company looked at Jonagorn.
"Um," said the Stranger. "Funny story there, actually. Well, not so much 'funny'. More sort of 'heartbreakingly tragic'. He didn't make it out of Moria, is what I'm saying."
Then in a halting voice he recounted all that had happened since they left RSU, of the spies of Sau'reilly in the mountains, and the downfall of Studio Moria, and the attack from the creature in the depths. "An evil of the Ancient Ways of Thinking it seemed, such as I have never seen before. It was both hateful and narrow-minded, intolerant and oppressive."
"It was a Falrog," said Stepholas, "of all elf-banes most obnoxious."
"Great!" cried Dinelloborn, throwing up his hands. "Just great. How do you plan on finishing this quest without Lewis? We may as well give up. Throw in the towel. Go home."
"No," said Jonagorn. "I grieve, but I do not despair."
"Smart man," said Sedariel gravely. "Hope remains. You can still reach for the stars -- as long as you reach for the lowest ones you can." Again her voice shifted. "Unless, of course, one of you is a snitch."
And with that word she held them with her eyes, and in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Stepholas could return her gaze for long. It didn't help that she was slightly cross-eyed, and had a disconcerting way of rapidly winking one eye after the other. Ed quickly blushed and hung his head.
At length the Lady Sedariel released them from her eyes, and she smiled prettily once more. "You've been through far too much lately," said she. "We can talk more about the quest later on. In the meantime, who wants cake?"
"Will you serve it covered in sprinkles?" asked Stevli.
That night the Fellowship slept on the ground, much to the satisfaction of the hobbits, and listened to the songs of elves in the trees.
"What are they saying?" asked Sam.
"I'm not going to translate for you," snapped Stepholas. "This is Chicagórien. Speak Elvish."
"They're singing about Lewis," said Jason. "I can understand some of it. Not much point in translating, though. It's mostly swear words."
"Swearing about how Lewis was fucking awesome, I hope," said Rob.
"Yeah, pretty much."
From then the talk turned to the day's journey, and to the Lord and the Lady. "What were you blushing for, Ed?" said Rob. "Feeling guilty about something? Planning to steal one of my blankets tonight, maybe?"
"Why would I be thinking about your blankets?" demanded Ed, in no mood for jest. "If you must know, she seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire. As if she were scanning me with some kind of . . . home-ometer. And I didn't like it at all."
"That's funny," said Rob. "Almost exactly what I felt myself; only, well, only nothing, so shut up!"
All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he or she had been offered a choice between the treacherous road ahead and something greatly desired that could only be gotten by turning aside. (All but Stevli, who insisted that his must have been some kind of fluke. "I mean, come on, I had a vision in which I was a forty-year-old virgin and the Lady Sedariel was a fortysomething ex-whore! How could that possibly make any sense?")
"And on top of that," said Stepholas, "it seemed like if I did decide to cut and run -- which I would never do, of course, but if I did -- nobody else would know."
As for Jason, he would not speak, though Kilbornomir pressed him with questions. "She looked at you an awfully long time, Tie-bearer," he said.
"Dude," said Jason, "lay off, all right?"
"All right, all right. But be careful. I'm not too sure about this elf babe."
"You can lay off of her, too," said Stevli.
They remained some days in Chicagórien, so far as they could tell or remember. Stepholas was away much with the Lord Dinelloborn and the other Elven-folk, and after the first night he did not sleep with the other companions, though he returned to eat and talk with them. When asked what what sort of business they got up to, his only reply was, "Befriending each other."
Often he took Stevli with him, and the others wondered at this change. But all attempts to broach the topic with any of the three were invariably met with frustrated shrieks of "Shut up! Your voice is like a Warg picking at my brain!"
One evening Jason and Sam were walking together in the cool twilight when they saw the Lady Sedariel approaching. She was clad all in white, though her skirt billowed out from the many layers of pink tulle crowded beneath it. She spoke no word, but beckoned to them.
Jason moved to follow, but his companion hesitated. "Come on, Sam," he urged. "You're the one who always wanted to see elves."
"I've seen them," protested Sam. "They're as hot as they say, but nothing ever comes of it." But she followed him anyway.
Sedariel led them down a long flight of steps into a deep green hollow in which was an enclosed garden. No trees grew there; it lay open to the sky. At the bottom, upon a low pedestal carved with the figures of rabbits, sat a squat black oven. Donning a set of polka-dotted mitts, the Lady opened the door, and from it she drew a tray.
"Here are the Muffins of Sedariel," she said. "I have brought you here so that you may eat them, if you will."
"What happens if we do?" asked Jason cautiously.
"Even the wisest cannot tell," said the Lady in a grave voice. "But I mixed the dough in the same bowl that I used to make a batch of the glint earlier, so it'll probably get pret-ty wild, if you know what I mean."
Still Jason hesitated.
"I'll try one," spoke up Sam. "What'samatter, Jason? Chicken?"
"Never let it be said that J-Squared backed down from a challenge," Jason shot back. "Hit me up too, Lady."
Sedariel gave them each one of the warm and steaming muffins. Jason took a great bite.
At once the veil of night seemed to lift, and the garden about him became very bright and intensely colored. A figure walked past, whose bearing reminded Jason somewhat of Lewis; but he was dressed all in white, and bore some sort of gigantic mallet. Before he could make sense of this, the backdrop had the audacity to melt altogether.
"Hey!" cried Sam from beside him. "They've blown up a dam in the Shire! The whole thing's flooded! We have to go home and help them!"
Turning to Sam, Jason saw that she had taken it into her head to change herself into a large, pink dragon wearing a three-piece suit and a straw boater. "Don't worry," he said, "it isn't real. At least, I don't think it's real. Sedariel, is this real?"
"Well," said the Lady evasively. "Real is relative, you know."
"Is it as real as the beast with a hundred eyes?" demanded Sam.
"Ah! That's a very good example! Yes. Everything you're seeing is as real as the beast with a hundred eyes."
Jason couldn't see any beast, which made him feel much better about the way the ground had developed holes out of which were pouring fanged peanut brittle. But then everything went dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Jason looked into emptiness.
In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye, lidless and rimmed with fire, its catlike pupil roving this way and that. The Tie that hung loosely about Jason's neck grew heavy as it searched.
"That's enough!" exclaimed Sedariel, and a cold splash of water across Jason's face shocked him to his senses again. The clearing reassembled itself in the proper order, and the few remaining polka-dotted cockroaches skittered away in embarrassment.
"We have to go home," moaned Sam. She was dripping wet, but, mercifully, no longer pink or scaly. "We've got to save the town . . . ."
"Nothing you can do at home will help," the Lady replied. "It's not like the Dark Lord will be dissuaded if you throw a parade. The only way to save your Shire is to keep that Eye from finding what it seeks."
Jason, whose mind had been on that last of his visions, gave a guilty start. "How did you know what I saw?" he asked, trying without success to avoid imagining the Lady without her skirt.
Sedariel began to undo the top button of her blouse. "Because the same thing is on my mind."
Too awestruck was Jason even to make a token protest on Sam's behalf. But the Lady only undid a few buttons more before she stopped, and slipped a fuzzy grey tie from its hiding place beneath her collar.
"This is Dustya, the Tie of Rabbitant," said she. "The Dark Lord has no idea. Oh, he has his suspicions, but he doesn't know. Not yet."
Jason gazed at her tie with understanding, if not a little disappointment. "Look, do you want the One Tie?" he asked abruptly, drawing it from beneath his shirt and holding it out. "Because if you ask me for it, I will totally give it to you."
Sedariel giggled. "You're a sweetheart," she said, patting Jason's cheek. "But I never wanted to be an important actor on the world stage. I'm just going to go West, and hang out with Paul, and bake my cupcakes and raise my rabbits, and probably be forgotten in a couple of ages."
A sadder fate Jason could hardly imagine: not only for the charming Lady, but for the Middle-america that would forget her.
"Can I ask one thing?" he said. "Since I'm a Tie-bearer, how come I can't do your mind-reading trick?"
"You haven't tried," replied Sedariel sensibly. "Don't! Tie use will ruin your life. Trust me. I'm a user myself. And you're already seeing more things than you would otherwise. Sam, did you see my Tie?"
"Lady, I have no idea what you're talking about," Sam answered. "Does this mean you're not going to take off anything else?"
Now featuring footnotes. See also: list of previous chapters.