{A very heartfelt thank you to KariTS for picking up my story and following it this month. Thank you!}
I have no will to weep or sing,
No least desire to pray or curse;
The loss of love is a terrible thing;
They lie who say that death is worse
*
Time began to pass again.
"There are days when I do not know what to do with myself," I confessed to a friend of mine over tea one morning. There were some mornings when I slipped out of Thranduil's house far earlier than I usually rose and just walked. Nowhere in particular. Sometimes through dusty and forgotten halls, sometimes through the shadows that were growing in the forest. We had been watching them grow, and had felt their chill creeping into our homes and our hearts, and not one of us was able to live as mildly as we had before. "There is not a single child left in the Woodland Realm. There has not been in three hundred years."
"I suppose our irascible king does not require caretaking."
"Not often." But he too had suffered from the shadows encroaching on us. Most people saw little to no change in our king's demeanor, but most people did not see him as or as much as I did, so of course they would not know the difference. "Though he has his days as well."
Most people saw no differences. Most people hardly saw him. But I noticed. Where on occasion, if he were in a pleasant mood, he used to lay his hand over mine on his shoulder, in the last fifty years he had not. I sorely missed the occasional contentment I would see in his face. I often feared, now, that I would never see it again.
But it was nearly impossible to look after someone who neither wanted to be looked after nor, I believed, would allow it.
"You are distracted today," my companion, Ceris, informed me, her brows lightly puckering in concern. She knew my habits concerning worry or discord.
I sucked in a breath as I looked back to her. "I am sorry. You are right."
"Perhaps you ought to look into gardening. It would give you something to nourish."
"I already look after Thranduil's courtyard a bit, but admittedly I'm not skilled with anything more complex than pruning or detecting insects."
Ceris smiled. "What is it you do not do for our king? He ought to give you a medal."
"Oh no that would never work. I would not accept it."
"That does not mean-"
"I know but you don't understand." I turned my rose-colored teacup slowly in hand as we observed the forest below and the skies beyond. "People ought to be given rewards for doing things that are outside their nature, that contradict their usual instincts or intentions for a greater cause or for someone else's benefit. I have done nothing out of my ordinary instinct. There was no hesitation in me for anything I have done in regards to his family."
"Some would call taking an arrow worthy of recognition."
"And I was recognized. Thranduil was very grateful for it. But you would have taken the arrow for your own son, would you not?"
She shook her head at me. "Legolas is not your son."
"I love him as much and have had as much a part in his life; he might as well be. What one does for love needs not be recognized. Rewarding someone for something they ought to be doing anyway turns it into a job, a competition. Love is not a competition. Love is not a job. It does not require a prize."
"Hm." Ceris sighed, sinking back into her wrought-iron chair as comfortably as though it were silken sheets and down pillows. "Why are you so distracted today?"
"I am worried. The growing shadows worry me."
"Is this only because Legolas has left so often in the last century? He always returns. He always will."
"Oh do not promise me that." As adamant as I was I softened my tone to something closer to lightheartedness. "No one can promise that they will live forever. Not even us."
"Is that what concerns you then? The growing shadows and the son who continually delves into them, going to places where you cannot protect him?"
"In part, perhaps. I cannot pin it down. I am....unsettled."
"Does Thranduil feel similarly about the darkness?"
"He has his concerns. Many of which he does not share with me because he knows I have them too."
"The two of you are peculiar."
My lips curled like the edges of a drying leaf. "I cannot argue that."
"You know there will always be-"
"Inladris!" I stood immediately and turned at the sound of Legolas's quickened voice. He stood in the doorway behind us, expression grim.
"What is it?"
"Come with me to Father's balcony. Something is happening in Dale and Erebor."
I laid my teacup down on the glass table between me and my friend. "Ceris, I'm sorry. Thank you." I hastened to follow Legolas.
"What is happening?" I asked as I followed him. I saw what effort it took for him to moderate his pace so I, in full skirts, could keep up.
"A dragon has come," he said, voice low. "Dale is burning."
"My gods," I whispered, and took my skirts up another few inches so I could lengthen my stride. As it was I was still not accustomed to running.
Thranduil was already standing on the long stretch of stone before the window in the mountain. The hand clenched around the staff he held was pale, the bones appearing sharper than usual in his tight grip. I laid my hand over his on the staff as Legolas took a place at his other side. Though distantly, we could already see the smoke and flames that engulfed the once-beautiful city of Dale, the city we had helped nourish even after the dwarves added their influence to the city's wealth by populating Erebor. Even when the dwarves had left, we had continued our watch over the humans' city, and even when the dwarves had returned. Thranduil, in many ways, considered it his, as it was under his protection.
I wrenched my aching eyes away from the sight of the gold and brown dragon beating itself against the fortified front doors of Erebor, bordered by statues of the present king's forbears and the dwarves who had originally founded the mining community. I looked sideways up at Thranduil, and my heart wrenched as well. I had never seen his expression cut to such severe lines: fury, loss, calculation, consideration, memory. I knew he had come up against dragons before, and suffered greatly as a result. I tightened the hand I had grasped around his on his staff.
"Father." Legolas need speak only one word for Thranduil to understand. I, who also knew Legolas's heart, also understood.
"No."
"Father, if there is any way we can assist."
"It would take a week to reach Erebor, three days if we wished to do so quickly, and then we would be left facing an insurmountable foe on little to no natural rest. Either way we are destined to defeat."
"Between the dwarves' army and our own-"
Thranduil's head whipped around. "What army, Legolas? What army they have is trapped within that mountain, and soon to be trapped with the dragon as well, if he does not manage to efficiently slaughter them all, as I am sure is one of his prerogatives."
Legolas looked imploringly to me.
I shook my head, my hand over my mouth and tears in my eyes. "I'm sorry, Legolas. But I cannot make a rational decision in this."
My heart burned with the dwarves and the men who were as yet dying by fire. But I myself would be utterly engulfed if I were to lose either Legolas or Thranduil to it too. Perhaps we ought to help-there was always the chance that we could find some way to slay the dragon, especially if he was drunk on his own supposed victory-but I could not voice any agreement to that possibility. I could not lend any part of myself or my heart to a venture that, even if it saved thousands, had the potential to devastate me. If I lost both of them I would suffer the worst and the shortest, because why then need I stay if no one here needed me?
But if I lost only one. Well, my grief then would be half. But it would be stretched over eons as I remained, half-drowning in it and all the others, determined to keep at least my lips afloat so I could still tell whichever one of them had survived that they too would survive, even if I no longer wished to for myself.
Which one of them would be harder to lose, I wondered? Or should I think of it as which one would it be harder to live with? I had promised Legolas from our first hour that I would never lie to him. How could I demand that he live his life by an edict I no longer lived myself? Could I break my first promise to him not only the first day after death, but every day hence? But if it was Legolas I lost, the boy I would always consider my son, the boy I would always wish to protect even when I no longer had the power to do so, would I be able to live with both Thranduil's grief and mine? Despite his harsh words to me on the matter once upon a time, Thranduil did not handle grief well. He may no longer handle life well either.
My every organ felt as though it were simultaneously burning and freezing with fear for an eventuality that might never come to be. "I'm sorry, Legolas," I whispered.
Because I knew he burned too.
For the next century never an hour passed that I wondered if we had not made the right or wrong decision. Smaug had his gold, but thousands of men and dwarves had been committed to wandering the wilderness or the struggle of setting up an entirely new life elsewhere. The men of Dale settled for building a new town on the Long Lake, having heard that Smaug feared open water. But their new home was within sight-distance of their old one, and they had to resign themselves to building anew with soggy scraps while the shattered grandeur of what they had once had still smoldered in the distance. Dragon fire is pervasive-the stones of that desolated town smoked for a month, and remained warm to the touch for an entire year afterward. The wood had simply blown away.
The dwarves chose wilderness. They, unlike Men, could not live under the smoldering eye of their once equally magnificent homeland and instead dispersed. Some sojourned to the Iron Mountains and formed a colony they called the Iron Hills. Others strung out toward Moria and, finding it overrun with orcs and goblins alike, retreated with spines drooping in despair. Thror, Thrain and Thorin came to our halls to ask Thranduil personally for his assistance in carving the dragon from their sacred halls, but just as he had refused his son, he refused them as well. He housed the dwarves while they were in our realm but they did not wish to stay long under the roof of someone they saw as having abandoned them in their age of greatest need.
"You should have considered that," Thranduil said, "when first you created your hoard." His cold eyes flicked to King Thror's haggard face. "You cannot claim I did not warn you. Their obsession with all things that glitter rivals even yours. The only difference is that he has the power to protect his own and you, evidently, do not."
And thus the dwarves left, and the three of us passed many silent suppers together. Legolas understood Thranduil's reasoning, as Thranduil understood his, but neither would yield and neither was pleased with the results of what had happened, and what we had not done.
A decade later the two were still at odds with each other. Legolas had begun, the first year, to despairingly agree with his father that the dragon could not have been defeated and our losses would have been in vain. But after a year the dragon's belly, once full of Dwarvish flesh, had emptied once again and he began to prey on not only the people of Lake Town, but on us as well.
"How long will his reign last?" Legolas demanded one night, confronting his father in his study, as furious as I had ever seen him. "How many of our people must be lost to break even with your estimate of what we might have lost had we confronted him before he settled himself in?"
Thranduil stood and shouted right back at him, equally furious. "If Smaug takes a dozen lives a year for the next century he still will have claimed fewer than if we had attacked him then and lost!"
"Do you care nothing for those who are paying the final price because of your inaction?"
"I care everything for the people who are not paying the final price for an action that would have accomplished nothing at all!"
We saw less of Legolas after that. He had always dedicated himself to his work among the guard, but now it seemed he had given them not only his time but his life as well. He committed himself entirely to rutting out the evil encroaching on our forest, his vigor and determination matched only by that of Tauriel, who happened to agree with him on the correct course of action.
A century passed. As careful as our people were we still lost a few every decade. Tauriel, to my great and unrelenting pride, was appointed the Captain of the Guard. The next day Ceris found me just outside Thranduil's home and threw herself into my arms, sobbing as though an ax were being driven slowly through her spine.
Smaug had taken her sister. They had been walking the forest together, in a place with thick enough trees they had considered themselves safe. Smaug had shut his jaws around her sister and Ceris had grabbed her hands. But as Smaug took flight and they were hoisted above the trees her sister had let go of her, and as Ceris fell she had watched her sister being taken away.
We sank to our knees right there in the wide corridor under the weight of our sorrows. I held Ceris tightly to me as she lay collapsed in my lap, her skirts spread around her like the bruised and bloodied petals of a shredded flower. Ceris sobbed until she lost her voice, and then she wept until there was nothing left in her to give.
Tauriel found me holding Ceris on the floor several hours later, rocking and singing to her just as I had Tauriel and as I had Legolas before her. It seemed there were always people for me to look after after all. She helped me bring Ceris home to her husband, who had been unable to find her, then we walked together through forgotten halls.
"I can see both perspectives," Tauriel said at last. "Neither pleases me, nor do I necessarily know which is right; only what I yet wish we had done."
"We have still lost fewer people than we would have in open combat with Smaug," I said resolutely, believing that if we had lost we would have lost tremendously.
"Thranduil's argument does not stand however if we would have won."
"We still would have lost a great many lives."
"And preserved still others. Dragons are just as long-lived as we are. If he continues this, it will only take another few centuries before we will have lost on both fronts."
"A lot can change in a few centuries."
She shook her head. "The humans have shown no inclinations toward leaving their chosen haven, nor have we ever shown any inclination toward leaving ours. We have endured many wars here and will likely endure far more as Arda ages. His continued existence is a festering sore, an illness, whereas our defeat of him, despite the losses, would have been one fell blow. It is far easier to heal from a loss of limb than a loss of heart."
When had my children grown so wise?
It was late when I crept through the door of Thranduil's study and sat in my armchair adjacent to his desk, resting my elbow on the desk's corner and my temple on my fingertips.
"My argument stands," he said after a long wait, voice as far away as the clouds, and about as inviting.
"I do not care about that. You need to breach your rift with Legolas."
"We are both of us welcome to our own opinions."
"Yes, and I believe it is healthy for the pair of you to fight on occasion instead of skirting around issues where you disagree like a pair of half-shaved and scalded cats."
He appeared to be ignoring me. I rose and stood at his shoulders, dropping a hand to rub back and forth over the top of his back where I suspected it most ached due to the hanging of his head over his spreadsheets. Even I did not understand these ones, and I had been working with most of them for centuries.
"Do you remember what you told me, Thranduil, when I said I was no longer needed? That I was now expendable, extraneous, or at least that that was how I felt?"
Thranduil laid down his quill and massaged his eyes.
"You told me that while Legolas may no longer require a caregiver he would never not need a mother." I leaned over him and lowered my voice. "Legolas will never not need his father. Not a father, but his father. Fix this. Or someday he will no longer see you as one."
Linwea found me unrested in my window again the next morning. Even with my most personal griefs so very far behind me she sometimes still did. At least she did not scold me anymore; it was long since I had grieved so deeply that my rest so defiantly suffered.
I never found out if Thranduil and Legolas spoke. A partition had risen between them, and from Smaug's inhabitation of Erebor to nearly two centuries after it remained. I despaired to see it, but the two did learn to converse sanely with each other again, without glowering in most instances. They were even able to discuss things over which they may not entirely agree. I was exhausted with my own relief to see them trying, at least, to no longer resent one's opinions and the other's choices. I prayed someday they would smile at each other again.
That was all I wanted, for a very long time. My happiness could be bought by a smile. And it wasn't even supposed to be directed at me.
(pg138)
> from The Loss of Love, by Countee Cullen