Desmemoria by UnnamedElement

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New Moon

Asterisks indicate lines lifted nearly in whole from the Silmarillion.

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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.

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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.

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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 …