Desmemoria by UnnamedElement

Felted Acorns

Read Felted Acorns

The Elvenking’s Halls
Northern Mirkwood, T.A. 1752

“Legolas.”

The child kicked his feet where he lay on the rug in the center of the sitting room, painstakingly copying letters from a ledger to a cut of dark cloth laid out before him. He dropped his head into a hand in utter concentration and did not look up. He continued to hum as he worked, and his cheek was streaked with the chalk with which he wrote, for he had not suffered to sit for braiding that morning and had been swiping at the locks of unbound hair that fell occasionally against his nose all afternoon.

Thranduil drummed his fingers on the table and watched him work.

“Emlineg.”

The child shifted and moved his hand to hold the cloth still as he started on the next line. The small chalk handprint on his forehead shone in bright contrast to his tawny skin, all darkened further by the room’s dim light for—outside the window cut into the face of the mountain—a mighty storm raged, and Thranduil had not bothered to light the lamps.

And, again, Legolas did not bother to answer him. Thranduil crossed his legs and tried again.

“Legolas.”

A glance this time, but without picking up his hands from his task. He looked back down and finished the gentle swoop on the last letter, and then finally dropped the chalk and looked up at his father, young eyes wide and dark as winter dawn as he waited. His feet finally stilled on the rug behind him.

“You have been busy today,” Thranduil observed after the child had settled.

“I want to write my name.”

“Which one?”

“Legolas,” the child answered simply.

Thranduil pushed back his chair as his son clambered up from where he lay, pulling up his knees to his chest, and he crouched down beside him, ran a finger lightly down the uneven edge of one of the letters. “You are so close, son.”

“I know!” He beamed, and Thranduil could not help but smile.

“But it is time for supper, so put away your letters, please.”

Legolas moved quickly this time, and he rolled his chalk within his sheet of cotton, glancing at his father and beginning to babble as he folded it away. Thranduil nodded along absentmindedly until his child tugged at his sleeve and repeated a question he had, obviously, missed.

“Why is it called that, Father?”

Thranduil blinked. “Why is what called what, emlineg?”

Legolas lifted the multiply folded and rolled cloth in his hands and waved it as he asked:

“Why are these ones called Feanorian letters?”

Thranduil raised eyebrows in surprise before taking the tools from his son’s small hands and tucking them away behind a stack of books on a sidetable. He pulled his child into his lap and began to stand.

“They are called that because they are not Cirth, Legolas. The script you are learning is called Feanorian, though—here—we generally call it Tengwar.” 

“Oh.”

The child’s fingers had begun a busy but mindless exploration of the embroidery at Thranduil’s collar, and Thranduil made a grab for Legolas’ abandoned sweater while he was occupied, before pulling it none too gently over his head. He threaded loose limbs through sleeves before the child could register what was happening. His youngest was sometimes slightly… feral, and surprise tended to cow his impulsive responses more than anything else.

“Now,” Thranduil said casually as they headed out the door. “ I have a question for you , Legolas.”

Legolas spat disheveled hair out of his mouth. “Yes? What is it?”

His son had hooked a finger in the space behind a button and tugged as he looked up, and Thranduil looked away when he paused to lock the door behind them.

“Where did you hear it called Feanorian, child?” he finally asked, turning the key.

“Oh!” Legolas exclaimed immediately, and his face lit like the sun, seemingly proud of himself for knowing the answer to even a single question his father might ask. Thranduil sometimes forgot how frustrating it must be to be not only the youngest in a family but—very nearly—the youngest in a realm... “Galion!” the child continued. “When he helped me find chalk this morning.”

“Ah,” Thranduil murmured, and he propelled himself into motion, and they walked in silence for a moment.

Legolas kicked his legs against him and watched the lamps on the wall flicker. The silence did not last long, however, for by the time Thranduil was reaching for the door leading out of the family wing into the community halls, Legolas had tugged hard at the button behind which his finger was hooked and asked directly:

“But, Father, what does Feanorian mean?”

Thranduil was tired and hungry and, if he were honest, he was in no way prepared for the request of such a history lesson, but Legolas blithely continued, brows pinched in thought: 

“Is Feanorian… Is it like when Mother calls your Oropherion?”

Thranduil dropped his hold on the door’s and shifted Legolas from his hip to his front so he could look him in the face. “No, child. Fëanor is someone’s name.”

“Oropher is someone’s name!” 

“Yes, but it is a different—” Thranduil cleared his throat and tried very hard not to sigh. His son had too many questions today, and Thranduil had never particularly enjoyed the details of grammar. “Never mind that, emlineg . Fëanor, however, is the name of the person who made the letters you are learning.”

The child’s face lit again, this time with curiosity and excitement. “Fëanor made the whole of the languages? The whole of Sindarin and Woodland?”

“No, no,” Thranduil murmured, and he finally pushed the door open with a shoulder and carried him into the corridor, casting a smile at one of his counselors as she passed them. “He made the script we write them in. Our people made their own languages; we just use his letters to help us record it.”

“Oh.”

Thranduil ducked behind a tapestry into a winding side corridor, unconsciously catching Legolas’ wrists up into a hand before he could grab at the hanging behind them. In the whoosh of wind that followed, the child laughed and commented:

“Fëanor must have been very smart.”

Thranduil nodded and said simply, “He was very smart, child.”

They were out the other end of the side passage and into the bustling front halls now, wide and high, well-carved and bright. Thranduil nodded to his folk with smiles as he passed but kept his head  purposefully inclined toward his youngest to indicate he was occupied.

“Mother says this script—Feanorian, Tengwar— Mother says that it cannot hold all of our sounds. One day, I will maybe make a language of letters that is better for our tongue than Fëanor's.”

“Perhaps you will.”

They were at the main dining hall, and Thranduil peered inside before stepping back to lean against a column, shoulder blades flush with the pillar and hips popped out to balance his son on his abdomen. They would wait for Gwaerain before going in.

Legolas leaned back into the cradle of Thranduil’s arms so his father was, for him, a seat. Thranduil raised an eyebrow wryly, for the child was considering him cautiously.

“I should like to learn about him.” Thranduil tilted his head and opened his mouth to speak, but Legolas continued: “About Fëanor. I think I will ask Galion.”

“You will not,” Thranduil said smoothly. “Besides, child, we do not have books on him in the archives. Fëanor is very old.”

Legolas lifted small hands in frustration and dropped them emphatically onto the patterns of felted acorn sewn onto the chest of his sweater.

“And so are you!” he protested. “So why do we not have them?”

Thranduil did not immediately respond, and he was vaguely aware of streams of elves filing past him into the hall as he considered his son. His grey eyes were wide and imploring, so much like his own mother’s, and there was an intelligence there that had always shown through but was—ever more, every day —becoming more pronounced. There were pieces of the puzzle shifting, now, in his child’s ever-busy mind, and Thranduil did not particularly like that, for this precious child was aging before him and—one day—his own curiosity would propel him out of safety and into the world and its people, its histories…

Thranduil shifted Legolas slightly so he could use one hand to take up his son’s before those fingers started picking at the stitching around the felt.

“Remember how I told you,” he said quietly then, and he watched Legolas’ face carefully as he proceeded, “how your grandfather and grandmother and I ran from Doriath, when I was young?”

Legolas nodded, and his hand stilled immediately within Thranduil’s.

“The books about Fëanor were there,” he said simply. Legolas’ lips parted as his brows scrunched once more. “And in our flight we could not take them.”

“Oh.” There was a subtle nod, then, just enough that one dark-honey curl slipped from the neckline of his sweater to bounce against his nose.

A brown hand cut into Thranduil’s vision, and he looked up with a smile as his wife brushed the lock from Legolas’ face and tucked it behind an ear. The child raised his arms and Thranduil transferred him to Gwaerain, who immediately pressed a gentle kiss upon his brow. Thranduil did not quite meet his wife’s eyes though he felt her heavy gaze, inquiring. He cleared his throat and closed the topic for the evening, dropping a heavy heavy hand on the small of Legolas’ back.

“When you are older, emlineg, there are bards here who can tell you the tale of Fëanor and his folk, far better than I.”

Gwaerain shifted and looked at Thranduil sharply, and Thranduil met her eyes this time with a sad smile.

“When I am older...” Legolas said thoughtfully, trailing off.

“When you are older,” Thranduil repeated.

Thranduil stepped away from mother and son and swept out an arm magnanimously, eyes purposefully teasing as he ushered Gwaerain in before him. As they entered the hall, Legolas’ chin was resting on his mother’s shoulder, and he was watching his father carefully as Thranduil followed. 

Thranduil stepped closer to ruffle his son’s hair and break the spell, but Legolas spoke so suddenly than he nearly froze:

“Because Fëanor was a very smart man. That is why I must wait until I am older. So I can understand him.”

Thranduil could not answer and only brushed a long hand down his son’s cheek as he fell into step beside his wife. Over the low murmur of evening conversations, Thranduil heard Gwaerain speaking for him:

“Yes, child,” she assured their son. “It is something like that.”

Their other children greeted them as they approached their usual table at the front of the hall, and their daughter Felavel swept Legolas from Gwaerain’s arms and spun him about before settling him on her hip dramatically. Her golden hair was braided neatly back, but a cut on her cheek was irritated and red, her uniform torn on one side and unwashed—she had come straight from the woods. Their eldest, Lumornon, bent to kiss his mother’s cheek, and then he had taken Legolas from Felavel and situated him on his customary pillow between the two siblings, so he could reach the table.

Thranduil sat down beside Gwaerain, reaching for the decanter of wine before he had even settled, but his wife pressed a goblet into his hand and met his eyes warmly. She laid a hand on his thigh under the table, and turned her attention quite fixedly to the children, beginning to ask Lumornon about his delegations; Felavel about her schedule; and Legolas about his twice-damned letters...

Thranduil sent a prayer of thanks to whatever Vala was still listening, an ode to the sensitivity of his wife, an ode to her beauty and intelligence, an ode to the grief that had brought him her—his joy—and these children that they shared between them.

Across the table, Legolas was showing Lumornon how to make the first letter of his name—“Both our names!”—using pickled green beans.

Felavel was laughing, and Thranduil smiled over the rim of his wine glass, and let the world move on around him.

.o.

Later that night—long after Legolas had gone to bed—Thranduil lay on the sofa in their sitting room, arm cast across his eyes.

Gwaerain sat close at his hip.

“He cannot find out like Felavel did,” she said kindly.

“That is why our people’s accounts are locked away elsewhere, now,” Thranduil answered tiredly. “Instead of on the shelves… Not that it went particularly well before when we explained it to Lumornon ourselves, either,”

Gwaerain grimaced. “We have made mistakes.” Thranduil did not reply, so she pushed ahead: “You know he will ask Galion, Thranduil. Our child might be a whirlwind—a rambling vine of wild honeysuckle, as you call him—but he is exceptionally aware of himself and the people around him... He will immediately target those he thinks most likely to satisfy his curiosity while providing the least resistance.”

Thranduil sighed and kneaded his forehead. “Galion will not answer him if even he asks. I have told him not to.”

Thranduil opened his eyes to see Gwaerain shrugging casually. “Then he will ask Thelion, Thranduil. He knows your confidantes.”

“Gwaerain…”

“ Oropherion …” she immediately countered, and Thranduil huffed a laugh.

She took his hands in hers and tugged him until he sat straight and tall beside her.

“I have told you how, last month at the Long Lake,” she said gently, “Legolas asked me why he looks different from his friends, why the elves of his home are more varied than the groups of Men he sees in the settlements around us. He is thinking big thoughts, Thranduil, and we must be prepared for his difficult questions.”

“He does not look different from his friends,” Thranduil muttered under breath.

“Forest-brown, like my kin, and gold as sunshine, like yours?” she asked incredulously, and she swallowed a laugh at Thranduil’s immediate look of chagrin. “The only one in this entire forest that looks like him is his sister.”

“Aye, yes.”

“Ignorance does not suit you, my star.”

Thranduil sat in silence beside her, let himself think as she twisted a lock of his hair about a finger before tucking it out of the way. Finally, she leaned into the couch beside him.

“You must find a way to tell him. Otherwise, he will hear it from someone else.”

Thranduil did not answer and Gwaerain sighed.

“Thranduil, please—”

His face flushed and he lowered his eyes, raised one hand to silence her. She did not usually heed such motions, but tonight…

Several moments of pregnant quiet expanded between them before Thranduil broke the tension.

“Our son is not old enough, Gwaerain,” he managed between clenched teeth, “to know his father is also a kinslayer—”

His voice rose without meaning to, and he closed his eyes against the sound.

“—and I will not suffer my hand being forced in this—”

(His heart was full of sorrow, his son, the last child to hold him in unmarred esteem—)

“Legolas is a child!” he finished roughly.

He ached.

There was silence for less than a moment before Gwaerain grabbed his hands with an unrestrained violence and shook him hard, forced his eyes to hers as she hissed, “And little more than that were you!”

“I was not a—”

“Quiet,” she said cuttingly. “Quiet.”

Thranduil fell silent and let her hold his hands tightly.

“You were a child compared to what you are now. You were a child compared to even Lumornon. No one holds it against you. Kill or be killed—I am not so wholly ignorant of those vaunted histories.”

Thranduil met her dark hazel gaze steadily and swallowed down the overused words.

There was a full minute of silence between them this time. Both sat stiffly, leaning in toward one another without the need for spoken word. Finally, Thranduil inclined his head to her in acquiescence and—a moment later— he laced their fingers together and deflated.

He leaned back into the sofa so he pressed up against her.

“I would be a fool to accuse you of ignorance,” he finally said lightly.

Gwaerain’s responding laughter was shafts of summer light on the shadows of his soul.

New Moon

Asterisks indicate lines lifted nearly in whole from the Silmarillion.

Read New Moon

The light in the room was pale gold.

It was several hours since Thranduil had started his day in pre-council planning with his closest advisors, Thelion and Brilthor. It was less than one since they left him, since he had crossed to the council room window—after far too long bent over parchment—to stretch. There, he had watched through misted lead-glass as Gwaerain unraveled a long scarf from about Legolas’ neck, tossed a loaf of bread to the guard who had walked the child home for lunch, and then shoved him back toward the winter-muted grounds.

Now, though, he sat stiffly at the table in his main study. His wife sat in another high-backed chair beside him. The door to the study was locked, and Gwaerain had informed him she had cleared his afternoon schedule.

Her hand was laid lightly on his thigh.

Before them on the polished oak surface was a crate full of ledgers, which were—in turn— filled with the words of elves. A few of these ledgers were the copied words of Pengolodh of Gondolin, but the rest held the words of his folk, collected either at Balar or Ossiriand in the First and Second Ages. They were memories of Doriath and of Sirion and the War of Wrath, or so he had been told when they were entrusted to him after his father’s death. For his part, after that first real war he could remember, he had locked away thoughts of those particular pasts. Once they had left the Rivers and crossed the Mountains into the Vales after Harlindon—for they had slipped along farther and faster than Galadriel and Celeborn, who traveled to that place that would become Ost-in-Edhil—Thranduil had (like most of the few remaining Sindar and Laiquendi) tried very hard to forget them. 

He had never even discussed them with Gwaerain.

The Last Alliance? Certainly. Her own family was involved. But those early years of his life in lands swallowed, now, almost entirely by the Sea…?

A flash of light cut the table before them, and the crates were streaked winter-pale gold.

Thranduil lifted his head to look out the tall window, pulsing with the mid-afternoon light that vibrated between the naked branches of the great oaks and beech that crowded the banks of the river, that cast patterns now on the table like ripples in water.

Like memory.

He had never been able to unremember them. They reared their heads every few centuries like the grief that intermittently tripped him since the loss of his father. Unpredictable yet, somehow, still ever-present...

Gwaerain shifted beside him and Thranduil felt his energy suddenly drop, grounded and attending. She was a presence. Always dynamic, not demanding and yet… Vibrant in a way he had never quite managed to be.

“I have seen death uncounted,” he said after a long minute, low and quiet and deep. “Grief and horror endless… I have seen, my love, the ground churn beneath my feet with the blood of men and orcs and elves. I have heard the hearts of trees burn when there was nothing I could do to quench them.”

She raised a hand and laid it upon his arm, and he adjusted his chair and turned into her.

“But these things from Ages past…” he finished and shook his head.

Gwaerain threaded strong fingers through his.

“It is different,” she said simply. “Perhaps it is time these memories were brought into the light.”

Thranduil shook his head again. “It is not my place.”

“You are the Elvenking, my evening star. It is exactly your place. Who else is there to do it?”

Thranduil did not answer.

“Have you ever read them all?”

“I have not.”

The table was painted gold again with the shifting light.

“Have they been braided, yet, into a story?” she continued.

She knew they had not been, but he humored her nonetheless: “They have not.”

“And have you ever had your questions answered, as to what exactly happened those days? What happened to you; what happened to those you never saw again?”

Thranduil did not speak for a long moment, and when he did it was low and even.

“Love, I hardly even know what happened to my grandmother, to my mother’s father and my father’s mother, to my aunts and uncles in Arthórien… And these testimonies cannot tell me that, for anyone who would have known fell with them also.”

Gwaerain watched him carefully and then laid a hand on the collar of his robes, straightening it momentarily before redoing a button. She picked at the piping on the sleeves as she spoke:

“It is a gift, Thranduil, to have these ledgers.”

She tugged at his sleeve subtly so he leaned back from the table and into the high back of the oak chair.

“Who among these—” She stopped to wave her hand gently at the light flickering on the crate. “—is still here to tell their tale but you? Who but you and Thelion and his cousins came back to us after—”

“Gwaerain…”

“It is a gift. My people—” she said, “—your children’s people… We do not write like this. We tell our stories in tales that we pass down father to child, grandmother to daughter to neighbor to wife year after year, generation after generation, and we rely on our people and our lore. This is how we know our truths.”

These things Thranduil already intimately knew, but he sat with his head bowed respectfully, eyes downcast, as he listened.

“But your people do not speak,” she continued quietly. “Your children’s people do not speak. You keep these stories in this box and have done it for so long that there is hardly anyone left to tell them. They have become a festering wound—five thousand years have passed, and still they burn the hearts of your people’s children—of our children—for they are hidden away and tempting and, so, they find them.”

Thranduil could not forget the look on Lumornon’s face—no older than Thranduil himself had been when he and his parents had run from Menegroth in the dead of winter, the cold of night, stumbling through glades lit brilliantly: his whole woods a bonfire. Felavel has a ledger, he had said, face paler than Thranduil had ever seen, hazel eyes dark and wide. I do not know where it has come from but the questions she has asked me… Father, it is about Sirion, and she is crying.

Felavel did not ever cry. Thranduil was not certain he had ever seen her do so since then, the day he had pried that disintegrating testimony out of her young and grasping hands, when he and Lumornon finally found her in the archives some time later.

He sighed.

“I do not understand why it is Feanor he must know about now. Cirth— Well, Daeron is far more palatable and was a friend to my mother’s family.”

“Ah yes,” Gwaerain answered cheekily. “Daeron, friend to Saeros, that admirable kin of yours, who we certainly want our son imitating.”

Thranduil opened his mouth to argue but Gwaerain teased:

“No, my love, the last time he asked you questions about your mother’s folk he spent the next two moons badgering every vaguely lore-inclined elf in these Halls for all those tales of Turin you had deemed too inappropriate for him to learn. If I have to hear the ‘Tragic and Perverse Tale of Turin and his Very Sad Sister’ told from the mouth of my child of seven summers one more time before he is eight…”

Thranduil smiled and Gwaerain laughed sweetly.

“So I have managed to convince Felavel to allow him to shadow her and Lostariel for the next few days while they train recruits. He will have no questions about letters when he can watch a warrior at work—”

“You have sent Legolas within arms’ reach of weapons with no one to mind him?” Thranduil asked incredulously.

“I do not know how to explain it, my love,” she said with a shrug, “but his respect for blades is uncanny. And even were it not,” she said with a small smile as she stood up to hang the tea kettle on the hook above the low fire in the hearth, “I have belted his mittens on at the wrists so he cannot get them off. With the use of only his thumbs, he could barely hold even his scone when I shooed him outside at dawn. He shall not be stealthily absconding with any weapons this day.”

Thranduil laughed truly for the first time that day and sat forward finally, fingers splayed over the table as he watched his wife move about at the fire.

“He is lucky to have you.”

“You are lucky to have me,” Gwaerain corrected smoothly.

And then she had brought them both tea, and they settled in to spend the afternoon sorting ledgers: Just the first sentence of each, she had told him. And then place them here.

And so Thranduil opened—

It was morning.

—and Thranduil read.

It was night.

And Gwaerain skimmed—

I collected kelp far out at the shore when first I heard the shouts—

—her own stack—

My father told me he saw the largest dragon that has ever lived—

—beside him.

If it was doomed to pass, I wish they had at least waited until winter. It was too beautiful that day: Breeze fresh, somehow, amongst the salt and sea; and the light on the water that snaked off the delta was silver and gold. My sister had just knit the first strange flowers of spring into her husband ’s hair…

For hours they did not speak, bearing silent witness. If Thranduil cleared his throat over much or stood more often than he was wont, Gwaerain did not mention it. By the time Lumornon knocked on the door to call them to dinner, there were three neat stacks laid out before them. Pengolodh’s ledgers and the accounts of Oropher and Thranduil, himself, were finally alone in the once-full crate, its wood painted flaming orange in the dying light’s magnificent sunset.

.o.

At dinner, Legolas told them all about the warriors he had seen that day, and Felavel chuckled at his accurate—if selective—descriptions of the training. Gwaerain watched their children as they ate and she commented intermittently, but Lumornon was quiet, and he rubbed often at the ink that stained his palm.

“Tomorrow I will braid your hair like mine and Amonhir’s, emlineg,” Felavel was saying. “I will make you the kindest, fiercest warrior this wood has ever known.”

Thranduil looked up from his plate to see his son beaming up into his sister’s face, and Thranduil tried to pretend he did not know where the tightness in his stomach came from upon witnessing such unbridled excitement from his child who loved the woods as much as he loved life itself, who he knew would ever place the defense of it ahead of his own safety, his heart, his family, even if Legolas did not know it yet.

But Thranduil was a father, and fathers knew these things, even about their sons who were gentler than they, though no less brave or strong—whose feelings ran deep, spun throughout bodies like twisted roots and questing vines, as intrinsic to their beings as organ and sinew and bone.  He pushed the future-fear down and his eyes caught, instead, on the strands of frost-nipped ivy wound about Legolas’ thin wrists, vibrating now as he mimicked a soldier pulling back a bow, sighting something in his childish mind that Thranduil could not see. 

“Ithildim’s mother has offered for you to spend some time with them this week, after the Feast of the New Moon,” Gwaerain was saying then to Legolas, and Thranduil picked up his wine, smiled perfunctorily when he felt Lumornon’s gaze fall heavy on him again. “She would walk you to Felavel in the fields in the mornings on her way to the kitchens, and take you back home with her at the end of the day. Would you like that?”

Thranduil barely registered the specifics of the child’s response, but he did register the feel of Gwaerain’s foot wrap about his ankle under the table.

She was buying him time.

Lumornon watched Thranduil unguardedly now, and Felavel had turned eyes away to pour herself another glass of wine. They let their parents lead this distracting dance with their youngest sibling, and Thranduil knew they neither condoned nor condemned their parents choices, that they only tried their best not to resent them the wound they prepared to rip through the moral fabric of their brother’s still fresh, green world.

Lumornon finally looked up, nodding understandingly even as his attention returned uncharacteristically to the ink on his palm. Felavel pushed the wine Thranduil had assumed was for herself across the table, and then she lifted long fingers to her small brother’s mouth to hush him.

Felavel spoke intentionally in proper Sindarin, a language Legolas did not quite fully grasp yet: “We will take him for the evening. Take care of yourselves.”

And then the three children rose as one and left him behind.

 ------------------------------------------------------------

Thranduil spent that whole next day in his study, ledgers laid out before him. He had begun to read: a kettle of tea to his left, a flagon of wine to his right, and a cup of each directly before him. He had worked his way through half the ledgers by lunch, and then pulled out his family’s accounts and Pengolodh’s, pushed his own slightly to the side. He took a sip of wine and began to flip through the loosely bound pages of Pengolodh’s accounts of the destruction of Doriath, and then the handful of sentences regarding Sirion.

In the middle of the page, amidst the account of Earendil, there was a half sentence that—in its simplicity—cruelly alluded to the pain his folk had suffered on that fateful day that marked the end of his youth and the beginning of the rest of his life. His eyes returned to it repeatedly, script careful and stark:

But Maedhros and Maglor won the day …*

The words burned his eyes and his stomach turned.

Maedhros and Maglor won the day …

Thranduil’s hand hovered above the cover of his family’s tattered ledgers that lay beside Pengolodh’s account, and he could not quite bring himself to touch them for, there on the cover of the topmost—in a square of inset-linen, penned in a much younger hand, Ages and continents old—was his own name, shakily signed after his accounting to his father during their recovery in Balar.

And then tucked within the very same sentence in Pengolodh’s, with no elaboration (barely a breath of space on the page):

…both Amrod and Amras were slain…*

Thranduil pulled his hand away from his own ledger as if burned and reached instead for his long-cold cup of tea. He took a long drink and cast his gaze to the hanging on the far wall, of the woods of Neldoreth where he had once lived with his parents, just beyond the gates of Menegroth. His mother and grandmother had woven it of an evening, over the course of that first year they resettled in what would eventually become Celeborn’s fiefdom in Harlindon.

When they had resettled there. After Sirion.

Thranduil’s last morning in Sirion had been spent behind his family’s lean-to for tools, sharpening the edge of a shovel as he watched his young, lanky cousins and the short mannish children playing kapanda on a stretch of hard-packed loam before him. The children had spent the time after breakfast carving the jump-squares into the sandy soil, and then spent another long while arguing in a creative conglomeration of tongues regarding whether to mark the numbers in Drúadan or Sindarin style. They were on their third full round and had gained several youthful Gondolindrim onlookers when an urgent and incomprehensible call went up from behind. Thranduil had ordered the children to freeze as he leapt to his feet and dashed round the corner of the cottage, peering past the scattered houses and huts to the Havens’ main square.

The fresh, post-dawn breeze whipped golden hair across his sight and he squinted before letting out a mighty cry of his own. His grandfather Muilin appeared at his side, then, bow in hand, and he shoved a Falathrim cutlass into his rapidly numbing hands as he too stared…

A host—small yes, and still far away—but their banners were black against the brilliant morning sun, splashed with the same stars from which he had run only thirty years before—

But black banners this time. Black.

Thranduil startled, shaking the ice-bright memory from his head and putting down his tea with a clatter. His mother’s tapestry filled his vision once more, and he imagined he could smell verdant beech and a laughing brook in a far-off Doriathrin summer...

He had managed not to think on any of this in years, managed for so long it almost felt like he had lived some stranger’s life before moving East.

But now his son—his brilliant, wild, curious Laegrim-Silvan-Sindarin son of Rhovanion—wanted to learn all about that brilliant house of Feanor who had given him the letters with which to write his own name.

Thranduil stood abruptly and stacked the ledgers back into the crate.

He pulled on his outer robe and slipped out of his study, hurrying down the corridor for the entrance hall to wander, for a time, in his very present, very real, eastern beechwoods.

.o.

To trick an elven mind is a difficult thing.

Time runs like water in well-banked streams and memory is the play of sunlight on its surface, rippling ever in the current and never truly hidden for, for elves, ever is there light, and it is only stronger and more clear at some times than others. The mind is a rock that parts that interplay about them, and on it the body can sometimes stand, and—purposefully—search.

To trick an elven mind is near impossible.

But water may breach rock and wash over land, it may wear down a mind and, even when the sun is high or the moon is full, light is, still, uncatchable by nature: roiled gold by the movement of the stream, by the shadows of tree branches in gusts of wind: stark and black on the reflected sky in the high noon sun. To trick an elvish mind is a difficult thing, but it can be overwhelmed and fractured when it resists, flooded and shaken about before settling down—if one is lucky—swift and calm as ever…

Thranduil picked up a rock on the bank near his feet and cast it into the late-winter river.

And so there came to pass the last and cruellest of the slayings of Elf by Elf … Few of that people did not perish…*

He had spent long hours doing the same after leaving Balar to live in the sparsely-wooded land in Ossiriand, nestled between the Rivers Legolin and Thalos. He had thrown rocks for hours in the times he could not find the words to speak. With every stone thrown he would sink further into his mind, try to clear the memories but they were vibrant as the day his homes had burned.

Maedhros and Maglor won the day … Amrod and Amras were slain…

He had long rinsed the blood from his hands, yet—to this day—he went to the water.

There was a tiny puff of air spun about his feet, then, and he looked down to see his small son suddenly beside him, hair braided back tightly from his face, just like his sister had said. Legolas reached down for stones without saying a word and began to stuff them in his pockets. Finally, he pulled back his small arm and launched a stone as hard and far as he could.

It landed in the center of the water and the child laughed and exclaimed:

“Here, Father!”

He offered Thranduil a handful of rocks cupped in gloved hands, and Legolas cried again—shocked—when his own gloved fingers brushed his father’s bare ones:

“Father! Are you not cold?”

Thranduil laughed and shrugged. “You are small, child. I am not.”

Legolas looked at him oddly but turned back to the river, nonetheless, to announce his new target: “I shall hit that tree!”

“That tree on the other side of the river, sparrow?” he asked patiently.

Behind them, his wife suddenly laughed, and Thranduil turned in surprise, for she was immediately upon them: a whirlwind of joy, ushering them away from the river into the halls for, she declared, Thranduil looked tired and Children as streaked with mud as Legolas are not permitted at New Moon feasts!

The child shrieked in protest and took off for the baths as his mother gave chase.

.o.  

Later, when Gwaerain was done with Legolas and had wrestled him into his neatest clothes of silver cream and pine, their son was a vision of the winter woods, that first place Thranduil had felt at home after thousands of years, unanchored. There was joy in the Halls that night, joy in the sprawling grounds outside of it… On the banks of the river and past the gates—all the way to the edges of the dark dark trees—music lifted and fires burned and wine flowed ever on into the stark black night.

At the end of the evening, Thranduil scooped his son up into a discarded rough-cut wrap and took him to his room. The child did not ask him about Feanor, and Thranduil did not have to lie to him. Changed into his bedclothes and tidying his face on his own, Thranduil watched the movements slowing and becoming more clumsy until he was forced to take over, braiding the child’s hair loosely and knotting it in a scarf as he began to drift.

Thranduil sang his son to sleep that night in that long-lost language of Doriath, and the child did not stir til morning.

------------------------------------------------------------

Morning, and straight to his study.

Gwaerain sat in his stead at trade review and Lumornon would meet with the Army leadership without him that afternoon. Legolas was occupied with his sister, and Ithildim’s parents would be taking him that evening. (He had seen the child dash out the front gates at dawn with an overstuffed pack, nearly as large as his small body, smacking against him as he jogged to keep pace with Felavel.) An image of Gwaerain from the night before flashed across his mind, then, and he turned his focus inward.

She had leant down to strip knit socks from her feet; she hopped on one foot as she followed him into the bedroom:

Do not let this inevitable knowledge be a darkness on Legolas ’ heart, like so much of our lives have been on our own.

 She had unwound her hair, then, so it was a dark, radiant halo about her.

Do not let this tale be the key that unarmours his heart and lets the Darkness in.

She had met his eyes in the mirror.

People like he and I, my star—we do not do well with that.

He had placed hands on her shoulders, kissed her on the temple near the ear.

You are skilled with words, my love. Tell the story, even if just for him, even if he does not read the whole thing until he is older.

Her hair had tickled his nose...

What she had not said was this:

‘Do it for your father, and the kin you lost. Do it for the lives that were not lived at all, for the barely-adult you wish you had been allowed to remain. Do it because you survived, because you were then given children that were gifted these lives of relative—marginal—safety.’

‘Do it,’ she had not said, ‘because you may give Legolas a gift of his storied past, because you wish it had been just that for you, too: a story.’

Thranduil dipped his pen into ink and bent over the paper.

‘Do it so your voice is somewhere—anywhere—in the history of this Wide and Wild World.’

She did not have to say these things, because in his heart he already knew.

‘If it is not written down, my love, if it is not spoken: did it ever even happen?’

.o.

Following is an account of the destruction of the Havens of Sirion in Year 538 of the First Age (to complement Pengolodh ’s account in his tale of Earendil of Gondolin), told on behalf of the peoples of that place, of whom the Doriathrin Sindar and Laegrim were. The stories herein are constructed from testimony of the survivors of the Havens collected long ago and put to page in Third Age 1754 by the hand of Thranduil of Doriath—remaining son of Oropher and Golnamir go Muilin—King of the Wood-elves of Northern Mirkwood.

Thranduil paused and took a deep breath.

He let the world of his Woods fade around him, until he was filled only with the memories and unmemories and tales forgotten that he had unearthed and absorbed from millenia old voices of kith and kin. A sea breeze kicked up around him, and the scent of morning tea was whipped away in a rising wind off the overwhelming walls of kelpish wrack, that particular bouquet of a wave-beaten delta at lowest tide, threads of water pure as mountain springs twisting on the updraft…

It was morning, and trade between families flourished in our small market. Sirion was less of a city than it was a settlement, but each day there bloomed into dawn, like a grateful flower, unhoped-for …