The Girl in the Garden
A small snippet of dubiously canon dialogue told from the perspective of Theonar recounting a day watching his daughter, Einris, playing in the garden as a child.
"..and then I saw her there, chasing rabbits in the garden. Enjoying the sunlight like I've never seen her do before and hardly seen her do since, 'specially not since that one summer. Seeing her head popping up over the grass and bushes, the way the sun flushed her cheeks and made that black hair turn the color of walnut wood; I'd say somethin' about it made the aches in my shoulders and the sores all over from that chafing armor go right away, but I know exactly what that somethin' was. It's that unique sort of love that you get to have when nobody's around to know it's yours. For me, then, it was knowing that she was happy running around and trampling the Lord's expensive, imported plants and trying to catch those rabbits, completely oblivious to the war around us and the one that neither of us saw coming brewing right under our noses. No noble duties, no wars, just a little girl, her mother's garden, the rabbits trying to hide from her, and the guard her father sent to go find her. I let her do that for a while until she eventually tired herself out and finally noticed me when she went to sit down by the pond for a break. Suppose that's the blessing and curse of being a halfling- that you're hard to notice. Took her back, then. Carried her all the way back to her father that asked me to find her in the first place. I'd always thought she grew fast, always faster and somehow slower than I remembered all the same, but I never realized how big she was until after I'd agreed to carry her the whole way back. Though, I suppose, she's much bigger now, bigger than me, even. Even though they have the same face, it's easy for me to forget sometimes that she's that same girl from the garden that day, chasing rabbits in the sunlight and giggling to herself."