This Creature is Lore

For quite a while I've been stricken with the odd dual phenomenon of a lot of ideas but total writer's block.  A couple circumstances lifted that these past few days, namely a new prompt set over at tolkien_weekly  (how could I resist the prospect of using the theme "Blessings" as ironically as possible?) that suddenly made finishing my long-delayed  responses to the "Bogey-stories" set easy, and  the January Action-Adventure Bechdel Test Challenge proposed byaliana1.

My finished drabble series concerning poor Gríma (two to date, each a chapter) can be found here.

For the Bechdel thing, I thought I was mainly going to write Thuringwethil, but Ungoliant (Wirilomë) came and stole the show instead and I've got nearly 4,000 words done.  Wirilomë is such a fun POV character for me as it turns out, because she has all these bizarre and inappropriate ideas such as might lead somebody to become a giant-ass spider.  AND. It's caused me to return to my pet project of trying to reconcile Arda's given history with Earth's geologic history (this gets easier the more I ponder it over time...shoot me, I used to want to be a geologist, okay?)  Thuringwethil is still going to be a major player, and my genderbent!Pallando had a cameo in a pivotal scene because any excuse to write Pallandë.  This is fun times  Thanks for spearheading this challenge, Aliana!

Because I've been taking Tolkien_Weekly's 'writing' drabble prompts terribly literally, the prompt of 'code' necessitated certain creative endeavors. 

The drabble, found here, contains an encoded note taken off the body of a slain Orc messenger, something resembling a code key, and leaves the note undecoded.  Readers can therefore interact with the drabble and decode the note.  O HUZZAH.

Or, as I'm anticipating, most people will rather just know right away what the note says, so I'm inserting a link to that at the end of the drabble.

PS - please bring any mistakes observed to my attention!  I'm way better at creating the code than actually applying it, so I might almost certainly have some errors.

( Text of coded & decoded missives. )