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When he received her final letter, the world should have shattered. The Sun should have burned out. The waters should have evaporated. The air should have thinned to nothing. Yet, the gentle afternoon light still shone into his study, and the parchment, now a canvas of dark watercolors with faint silver, was still in his hand. The sunlight drifted westwards, away from the lands that had swallowed her, and towards Aman, lands that may be closed to her forever.

Time kept moving. It did not bend, did not rupture, did not break under the weight of his grief. Vairë’s threads should have unraveled, frayed, snapped—something to acknowledge her fate, that she may be lost for all of eternity—but not this. His fëa should have died with her letter, but the world did not allow it. Although the Eldar were bound to the Circles of the World, a small part of him had escaped and drifted into the Outer Void, where all harmonies and the Music ceased to be.

Yet, the sky remained unbroken. Impossibly blue.

Thranduil closed his eyes, their corners still damp with his tears.

Focus. She is not dead. Not yet. There is still time. I need proof, either alive or dead. It is not over. She is a survivor—she survived Doriath, Sirion, Amon Lanc, the War of the Last Alliance. She will survive this too.

A knock at the door. His steward, Galion, faithful as ever, entered. If he noticed his king’s disheveled state, he did not comment on it.

“Your Majesty, Lord Faeron has convened the council to discuss the matter of Dorwinion and Rhûn. They await you in the council chamber.”

“I will be there shortly.” Cold. Flat. Regal.

Once Galion left, he stood, dried his tears on his robes, straightened his hair, and tucked her letter against his chest. For a moment, he felt her presence as he had known her in Menegroth, her green eyes bright with warmth and unburdened by tragedies, her umber hair reflecting the golden glow of the city’s lamps. And then, as if she had disappeared into a cavern of the Thousand Caves, she was gone.

As he passed the mirror by the door, he arranged his expression into one of cold neutrality. Sleek pale hair, silver-blue eyes. When the Sun and Moon were still young, she had told him he was too handsome for his own good, especially his eyes. She had said they reminded her of the Esgalduin in the winter, its pale frozen waters gleaming with a clarity that she found refreshing from courtly intrigues. “You can gaze into the ice and see the caught sunlight. It’s rare to see something so clearly these days.”

As he gazed at his reflection, all he saw were the shackles of kingship, of statecraft, of grief for things that should have been, but could never be. He forced it all down. He could not fall apart. Not here. Not now.

He was not out of options. To give up now was to insult her resilience, to deny all the times she had faced Mandos’s beckoning and refused. She was still out there. She had to be. And he was going to find her.

He turned from the mirror.

Time to see the performance his council will put on.

***

As he entered the chamber, a silence fell over the council. Many looked at him with sympathy, for all knew of his past with her. Although she was never his wife or crowned queen, they too had suffered the loss of kin, whether it was on the plains of Mordor or to the spiders that were starting to plague the woods. She had meant much to him, perhaps the world, and now, she had vanished on what was supposed to be a routine diplomatic assignment.

He settled at the head of the chamber. His queen, Ithildis, sat at his right. She murmured a soft “Your Majesty.” He tried not to look at her.

The silence lingered for another breath, like the hesitation that had cost her freedom.

Devoid of his usual charm, Lord Faeron began, “As you may know, Lady Tatharel Sûlthiriel, Envoy of the Woodland Realm to Dorwinion and Rhûn, was placed under house arrest by the foreign entities from east of the Last Desert who now economically control the region. She sent a final missive detailing her plight, although it is unclear under what circumstances, state of duress, or mental condition it was sent.”

The council murmured amongst themselves.

“She notes that her two guards, Thaladir and Orthelian, were separated from her at the beginning of her confinement and that she is unaware of their location or fate. In the best case, Valar willing, all three are still alive in Dorwinion.” He did not have to state the worst case.

“She also notes that Greenwood’s secrets have not been compromised. Again, it is unclear with what mental faculties she wrote this missive.

“I would also like to remind everyone that in a prior meeting on Dorwinion and Rhûn, these delegations from beyond the desert are interested in immortality. In her previous letters, she wrote that they have been watching her for some time.” The murmurs grew louder. None of those seated wished to recall that council meeting.

“So the question is, what do we, as Greenwood’s council, do next? Do we send a host of warriors to retrieve her? Send a party of scouts and rangers to track her whereabouts? Or do we simply do nothing, wish her well, and send a replacement when the region is safe again?”

Thranduil’s gaze darkened at that last suggestion. The wood of his throne creaked under his hands.

Faeron paused and glanced at Thranduil. “Anything to add, Your Majesty?”

Silence. A few shifted in their seats.

His voice rang like cold steel. “As King of the Woodland Realm, I would like to remind each of you of Lady Tatharel’s dedication to the kingdom. She could have had a comfortable life in Harlindon with her kin, but she chose to follow my father and me east to Rhovanion. She helped to build Amon Lanc, ensured that our armies were fed and clothed during the War of the Last Alliance, and worked thanklessly on our economic and diplomatic strategies for the past one thousand years. She is the reason why our trade with Dale and Esgaroth prospers and the fine Dorwinion vintage flows every year.”

Each word spilled from his lips like poison. Here he was, having loved her through three Ages, and speaking of her value only as a courtier, as a diplomat. No, she had always been more than that, yet he was forced to wrap his affections in propriety.

One of the Silvan lords, grey-eyed Thorondir, said “Lord Faeron, you grow more senile every year. Dorwinion and Rhûn are sovereign regions. They are not vassal states. Although Lady Tatharel was beloved by the council and her circumstances are a painful loss to Greenwood,” he briefly stopped to gesture a sign of condolence towards Thranduil, “To send a host of warriors to look for a missing envoy to a region with whom we only have trade agreements is tantamount to declaring open war. Are we to march five hundred miles east to look for her and antagonize our trading partners? With the forest growing darker each year, Greenwood cannot afford that.” Not for a mere envoy, his words implied.

The other Silvan lords voiced their agreement. It would be true folly to head along the Celduin to retrieve an envoy who may or may not be alive. Yes, Tatharel was an exceptional diplomat by all measures, but she was Sindar, of that old world that now rested beneath the waves. She was far too clever, far too aware, and far too influential on His Majesty. With a sympathetic smile, Ithildis nodded.

Thranduil’s jaw tightened. A cold fire burned in his eyes.

Faeron only smiled at Thorondir’s insult. “So, Lord Thorondir, are you suggesting we do nothing? You may be content to dwell in these woods for eternity, but some of us here,” his gaze swept over the Sindarin councilors, “will eventually sail West. And who do you think will be waiting for us the moment we set foot in Alqualondë? Why, her dear lord father Sûlthir, of course. And the rest of the House of Elmo. And when they ask what we did to find their beloved kinswoman, shall we look them in the eyes, say ‘Nothing,’ and face a Fourth Kinslaying?”

He added, “Easy for you to say if you will never have to face their wrath.”

The Sindarin lords exchanged uneasy looks. One exhaled sharply, as if remembering something unpleasant. He met Faeron’s gaze before quickly averting his eyes. In Doriath, they were minor courtiers at the fringes of power. What would befall them when they reach the Blessed West and have to endure the judgement of the High Councilor of Doriath, Thingol’s heart-brother, and the rest of that esteemed house? Would Olwë, kin to Elmo and Tatharel, even welcome them into his pearlescent city? Would they have to face His Majesty Elu Thingol himself, if he were re-embodied? And if he asked after her, whom he had once wished to claim as a daughter, even in jest, would they tell him they let her wither away in the east?

“We must do something,” one of the Sindarin lords finally said, less out of concern for her and more out of fear for himself.

Thranduil let out a slow exhale. Idiots. All of them. Simpering, self-serving fools. There was a real, breathing elleth whose life was at stake, whose fëa hung between Arda and the Halls of Mandos, and all they could think about was covering their own behinds.

A young Silvan councilor, recently risen in nobility, eager for prominence, asked, “She writes that Greenwood’s secrets are not compromised. But as Lord Faeron notes, it is unclear the circumstances under which she wrote that letter. Taken together with these entities’ interest in immortality and our people, she has something they want. Who can say what she told them in exchange for her life.”

Everyone stared. Regardless of their distrust or indifference towards Tatharel, openly questioning an envoy’s loyalty to her realm, a loyalty that she protected with her life, under house arrest and whatever horrific conditions she endured in Dorwinion, was a step too far. There were somethings that even if the heart believed, the mouth could not, should not, and ought not speak. Even Faeron did not know how to respond.

Thranduil’s eyes flashed with centuries of white hot rage. “Are you suggesting, Lord Sîrdhon,” he asked, his voice low and soft, enunciating every syllable, “that Lady Tatharel has engaged in treason?”

No one breathed.

His voice rose, high and crashing like a breaking wave, “Because I have it on three Ages and five thousand years’ worth of history that she would never betray this realm. She would rather fade than engage in what you are suggesting.”

He was not done.

“Tell me, Lord Sîrdhon, where were you when Sirion fell? Did you carry the bloodied, orphaned children of your kin from their burnt homes? Did you stand in the ruins, hands slick with lives you could not save? Did you ever face down Maedhros—Kinslaying Maedhros—knowing he would cut you down over a jewel?

“She did, and she lived.

“Did you ever toil tirelessly on the plains of Dagorlad day and night, ensuring that Greenwood’s warriors could eat as they bled for this realm?”

His voice dropped into something colder, gilt with mercilessness, “Tell me, how did your captain brother eat in that wasteland?”

“When he shivered beneath that sunless sky of smoke and death, did he have warmth?”

“When he drew his last breath in the healer’s tents, did he have medicines to ease his passing?”

He leaned closer, his voice barely above a whisper. “She did that. For him. For me. For all of us.”

Silence. Heavy. Absolute.

“And you dare to speak of treason?”

He paused to let the fool drown in his words. Then, at last, he said,

“This is a meeting to discuss her rescue. This is not a trial. But if you continue speaking, it may very well become one. You would be wise to hold your tongue before I reconsider your position in this council.”

Faeron smiled. The sniveling lad looked like he was about to soil himself.

Thranduil turned to the rest of the councilors, who were looking at anywhere but him. “As I said, this meeting is about her rescue. Greenwood does not repay its envoys’ loyalty with treachery.

“As satisfying as it would be to march on Dorwinion and Rhûn for this transgression, Lord Thorondir has a point. Sending considerable military presence eastwards not only weakens our present defenses but would be an explicit act of aggression.”

Oh, how it pained him to say it! If he were still a prince, he would have taken his swords, stolen the fastest mount in the stables, and headed east—past Esgaroth, past the Celduin, towards that golden wine country before his father even realized his absence. But he was king now, and kings were bound by duty, etiquette, and propriety. They did not act rashly. She was no Idril, and he was no Tuor.

“Thus, we will send a small group of scouts and rangers east to track her movements, gather intelligence, and facilitate a rescue. They will travel light and will appear unassuming. We do not wish to catch these foreign entities’ attention more than necessary.”

“Captain Calenhîr,” he addressed a seasoned Sindarin captain, “who do you recommend?”

The dark-haired lord thought for a moment and then said, “Your Majesty, we only have a handful of scouts and rangers present in the palace. Would you like me to recall some of the more experienced ones from the border?”

“No. For every moment we delay in finding her, the chances of her living diminish. Send whom we have. They are to depart tonight.”

The captain dipped his head. “Very well. In that case, I recommend Aeglas to lead the group. He is decisive under pressure and excellent in risk assessment, skills that would be critical as they venture into unknown lands.”

“The tracker, Tirloth, slightly younger, but nothing escapes her eyes. She is familiar with tracking over different terrains. Good survival instincts.”

“Saeroth, bit of a prick at times, but has some of the finest reconnaissance skills I have seen. His relatives are raft elves, so he has picked up a few languages—Westron, Khuzdul, and even some primitive Rhûnish.”

“The last one,” the captain trailed off, his mind running the calculations to find the final member to balance the party.

One of the Silvan councilors, ever the opportunist, smoothly slid in, “If I may, I recommend my sister’s son Celdir for the position. He may be young, but he is fast and agile, skilled in melee combat, and has some experience tracking in urban settings. I believe his skillset could prove useful.”

Faeron rolled his eyes. Typical. These councilors were like leeches after summer rain, like wading through court and emerging to find a whole lot of them clinging to one’s legs, fat and engorged.

Thranduil did not respond. He looked at Calenhîr. The lord considered it for a moment, weighing the alternatives. He spoke carefully, “Celdir is quite young, just a little over a hundred years. I would not send him under ordinary circumstances.”

His eyes flickered to the king. Thranduil gazed back in perfect neutrality. Calenhîr sighed, “But these circumstances are extraordinary…Your Majesty, if their departure cannot be delayed, then I suppose he will do.”

Thranduil glanced at Faeron, who was unimpressed. Then to the Silvan councilor, who smiled in satisfaction and sat a little straighter. He ignored them both.

He nodded. “Very well, thank you Captain Calenhîr, your insight is appreciated as always. I would like to meet them in my study before they depart.”

The show was over. He had a rescue to plan.

***

Thranduil heard them in the halls to his study long before they arrived. Calenhîr was already by his side, unamused.

“This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in decades! Did she really face down Maedhros in battle? And she carried Elwing out of Doriath when it burned? And we’re getting to rescue her? She’s the stuff of legends. This is the best thing that’s happened to me since I bested Morthil in that archery competition.”

“Shut up. Your voice is a dagger in my eyes,” a flatter voice drawled.

“Enough. Both of you, quiet.” A firmer voice cut through the noise. “His Majesty’s study is up ahead, and your voices are carrying.”

Thranduil looked at Calenhîr. The captain sighed. “They are the best we have in the palace, Your Majesty.”

Thranduil stared at him. So this was the best the palace could offer. A reckless child, a smart-mouth cynic, a silent shadow, and their weary nursemaid. This was the ragtag band of scouts and rangers who were going to find her and bring her home? He would need to revisit the army budget, something that Tatharel had handled (flawlessly, of course) when she still resided in his halls.

The captain made a gesture of exasperation, “Your Majesty, their personalities are…unconventional and perhaps leave something to be desired, but they are very skilled. You know,” he shifted into a nostalgic warmth, the kind that came from serving not only Thranduil, but also Oropher, “I think Tirloth might even best you at tracking.”

Thranduil made a non-commital sound. “I doubt it.”

The scouts entered. Aeglas entered first, his brown hair woven into neat ranger braids. He stood on ceremony, his back straight, shoulders squared, and eyes ahead.

Then, Tirloth, the tracker, lithe and wiry. She lingered in the corner, contemplative, her eyes scanning the room and mapping its contours and reflexively planning escape routes.

Saeroth, the lone Sindarin elf in the party, lanky and dark-haired, stood with one hand on the curved dagger that rested at his belt. With just enough respect he could muster for his paygrade, not one coin more. He was paid for his reconnaissance skills, not how well he could emulate a statue.

And then, Celdir, red-haired, eager, his eyes bright with the prospect of adventure, shifting his weight between his feet.

Thranduil did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Regardless, there was a task at hand.

“Scouts, Captain Calenhîr has recommended you for this mission of utmost importance to Dorwinion and Rhûn. Lady Tatharel Sûlthiriel, Envoy of the Woodland Realm, has been captured in Dorwinion. The details of her captivity, her life or death,” he paused for the briefest of moments, unwilling to speak such a terrible fate into being, “and the broader situation in the region remain unclear.

“From her previous correspondence, delegations from east beyond the Last Desert,” the scouts collectively drew in a breath, “have effectively subjugated the local Rhûnish lords through economic exploitation. Although the wine still flows from Dorwinion, whether these lords remain friendly or hostile remains to be discovered.”

Aeglas nodded. The corners of Saeroth’s mouth twitched, but Aeglas shot him a look not to interrupt. He kept his mouth shut.

“Your task,” Thranduil said, his heavy gaze settling over the four scouts, “is to travel to Dorwinion and Rhûn, find Lady Tatharel, rescue her from captivity if need be, and return her home.”

A brief silence, then

“If she is alive, I want to see her person.” His jaw clenched, and he forced each word out one by one. “If she is dead, I want to see her body.”

He added, his voice soft and tinged with bitterness, “Greenwood does not leave its envoys out to rot.”

His words echoed through his study. Even bright-eyed Celdir sobered at the thought.

Then, the tension melted. “You are to depart tonight. Any questions?”

The scouts shook their heads.

Then, something in His Majesty shifted. He looked out the window at the settling dusk, his eyes distant as if his mind were in another Age. Thranduil asked, “Have you ever lost kin? To the War of the Last Alliance? Or perhaps to the orc raids or spiders?”

They all nodded. Everyone here had lost someone.

Thranduil turned his gaze back to the scouts. His steel-blue eyes were composed as always, but threaded through them was a haunting, a longing, a fracture. “Then, you know what it feels like to want to find them if the opportunity exists, no matter how tenuous.”

Saeroth, despite his usual irreverence, straightened.

Thranduil’s voice dropped into something wistful. “I sit before you as king, but I ask you, from one elf to another, to find her and bring her home.”

The weight of their mission settled over them. This was not just some mission to retrieve a diplomatic envoy. This was personal, this was an attempt to hold onto five thousand years of shared history that was born through fire and ash and ruined worlds. How can anyone let go of that so easily?

The moment passed. Thranduil said, “If there are no more concerns, you are dismissed.”

The scouts bowed and departed his study. As they left, he could hear their voices echoing in the halls.

The young one, Celdir, exclaimed “It’s like we're Beren rescuing Lúthien.”

Saeroth’s sardonic voice cut in. “Whoever your tutor was, you should have fired him. Lúthien rescued Beren, not the other way around.”

Then with mock consideration, he added, “If anyone is Beren, it’s His Majesty, not us." He paused as if the realization was sinking in, “Though I doubt he’d appreciate the comparison.” His voice turned contemplative,

“We all know how that ended.”

Calenhîr, still in the king’s study, exhaled. “Unconventional, Your Majesty. Unconventional, but not unskilled.”

The captain smiled, “Although, if the reports are true, Celdir is not the only one to have taken her for Lúthien”

Thranduil stared at his Sindarin captain, who had fled from Doriath and followed his house east. Who had been in Menegroth when Thranduil was just a young noble who had first arrived at court.

Valar help them all.

***

They traveled through the night, the next day, and arrived at the outskirts of Esgaroth before nightfall.

They had laid out their traveling cloaks and their provisions of waybread, nuts, aged cheese, and some dried fruits and planned for a night of rest prior to entering the trading town the next morning. No fire was started as to avoid drawing any unwanted attention, but they sat in loose circle, still brimming with the excitement of their mission.

Celdir stretched out his legs and said, “First real night away from the kingdom! I’m glad we made it out of the woods today. Say,” he turned to his companions, “after Esgaroth, it’s just open plains along the Celduin right? Do you think we might be able to get some horses? It’ll help us get to Dorwinion faster.”

Saeroth rolled his eyes as he carved a piece of cheese. “Were you dropped on your head as an elfling? Do you know how much attention four mounted elves will attract? Should we also carry banners and let everyone know that His Majesty is sending us?” He scoffed, “Riding horses. At that point, we might as well be the cavalry.”

Celdir raised his hands, “Hey, no need to get upset. Sorry I asked. I was just curious.”

Aeglas, their long-suffering leader, said “Settle down. Let’s try to get to Esgaroth in one piece.”

They ate in silence for a few moments.

Then, Celdir, still eager, asked, “I’ve heard stories about Lady Tatharel, but I wonder what she’s like.”

Saeroth leaned in conspiratorially, his waybread half-eaten, “Well, young Celdir, I’ve heard that back in Doriath, His Majesty was absolutely smitten with her.”

Celdir’s eyes widened. “No way,” he breathed.

Even Tirloth, who had been silent, looked over in interest.

Aeglas just closed his eyes and sighed.

“Oh yes,” Saeroth continued, his eyes gleaming in the fading light. “They say that our king at the time was just the son of a minor lord there. He would trail after her, as if she had strung the stars in the sky herself.”

Celdir choked on his food.

Aeglas said, “One piece, Esgaroth in one piece.”

Tirloth said, “You lie.”

“I have it on good confidence that it’s true. I swear it on my next two gold payments,” he added earnestly. “Of course, she had plenty of suitors, but she entertained him because he was devastatingly handsome.” He clasped his hand over his heart and pretended to swoon, “That moonlit hair, those silver-blue eyes. They’re like glacial amber, and I’m the moth trapped in them.”

Celdir sat up straighter, contemplating Saeroth’s words. Then, he grinned, “He definitely was one of the hopeless ones.”

Saeroth smiled, lazy and slow, “Oh definitely, simpering after her while she handled actual politics, no doubt.”

Tirloth, entertained, added, “Or trade agreements. Or taxation structures. Or literally anything of importance.”

Celdir, with exaggerated court elegance, extended a hand and bowed, “Ah, Lady Tatharel, perhaps you would favor me with a dance—”

Saeroth played along, “No, young Thranduil, I am rather busy preventing the fall of a kingdom.”

A pause. Then,

Their laughter swelled at the ridiculous image of their dignified king acting like a fumbling lovesick fool. The sound of their merriment echoed over the reeds and through the humid air of the Long Marshes.

Even Aeglas was amused. “If His Majesty hears of this conversation, he will exile all of us.” The corners of his lips twitched.

Saeroth shrugged, unconcerned, “Well, if no one here tells, how will he find out? Unless,” his eyes narrowed, “one of you traitors snitches.”

Celdir gasped in mock horror, “I would never. Swear it on my mother’s honey cakes.”

Tirloth nodded solemnly in agreement. Then, her voice soft, “He did win her favor. But, in the end,” her eyes gazed out into the dark, “was it enough?”

Saeroth huffed, “Well, just look at who’s queen.” The scouts shifted uneasily. Everyone in the realm knew about their king and Lady Tatharel. It was an open secret. Despite the earlier banter, they tried not to imagine what it must have felt like to watch someone she had loved for three Ages bind his fëa to another for the rest of eternity.

The Sindarin elf quipped, “Not her, that’s for sure. Maybe she should have been.”

No one immediately answered him. Because what was there to say? He was probably right. Even though they were far removed from court, they remembered the outrage, the scandal that had filled the palace when the king’s engagement was first announced. Something about Sindarin–Silvan unity.

At the time, they had thought it unfortunate that Tatharel had been passed over for queenship. After all, politics was politics and that’s just sometimes how the pastry crumbled.

But now, on a mission to rescue this missing elleth, they were forced to confront what that must have meant for her. Her experiences. Her history. Her grief. Her pain.

“I wonder if that’s why she left,” Celdir spoke quietly.

“Who can say? She never spoke with me, but when I passed by her in the halls, she was always carrying reports or speaking with a councilor.” Saeroth’s voice lost some of its biting edge. “I thought she was one of those noble ladies who thought she was too good for the rest of us, until I found out she negotiated a trade deal that gave us extra funds to improve our weaponry.”

Tirloth tilted her head, thoughtful. “She’s an envoy to Dorwinion and Rhûn. She’s the reason why we can have Dorwinion wine every Mereth-nuin-Giliad, the cinnamon on our breads, the nutmeg at Yuletide.”

The scouts softened at her words. With the darkness settling over the forest, their work was getting harder and more dangerous. Sometimes, their fellow scouts didn’t make it back. It was the small comforts, like a loaf of warm, spiced bread or a goblet of the heady vintage that kept them going.

“So you’re saying that we’ve all been benefiting from her work somehow,” Celdir said, “I can see why His Majesty would want to find her. She’s more than just an envoy.”

Silence, then Aeglas said, his voice low and slow, “And we will do everything we can to bring her back. There is no room for failure. It’s getting late, get some rest. We have a long day ahead.” He laid down on his cloak and turned on his side, his back to the others, who followed suit.

As the wind rustled through the marsh grass and the stagnant pools reflected the stars set against a moonless sky, Irmo blessed them with restless sleep and dreams of a distant figure among rolling hills.

***

The next morning, they found themselves in the markets of Esgaroth. They had decided to spend the early morning among the porters, the merchants, and the bargemen to see if there was any useful information coming from the east. Since the Lake-men were used to trading with elves, they posed as representatives of the Woodland Realm, inquiring about the wine shipments for His Majesty.

Celdir wrinkled his nose at the smell of fish guts, unwashed bodies, and the general lack of sanitation. “I think I’m going to be sick” he moaned. His red hair seemed to lose some of its luster.

Aeglas glanced at him. He was sympathetic to his young charge, but they needed to keep going or they would lose too much ground. “Celdir, you stay by the shore or wherever the smell is least offensive. The rest of us will see what we can get from the men here.”

Celdir perked up slightly, “I mean—I can keep going, that’s all right.”

Saeroth snorted, “You’re greener than the cabbage they’re selling. I don’t want to be playing nurse to you when you end up hurling your guts out all along the Celduin. Stay, and let us do the work.”

Tirloth added, her eyes soft, “We’ll find you when we’re done.”

Before Celdir could argue, the three of them disappeared into the markets.

By mid-morning, they reconvened. They had not expected to hear of any news of Tatharel directly, but there were some…abnormalities with the wine shipments from Dorwinion.

One merchant, a grizzled bear of a man, said, “The last shipment from Dorwinion was late. But you know,” he smiled, a little too wide, “that’s how the business is sometimes. Sometimes the roads are closed, sometimes the river floods. What can you do? Nothing to be worried about,” he finished quickly and glanced at his ledger. “Yep, happens all the time,” the man said, as if he were trying to convince himself as much as the elves.

Saeroth noticed how the man’s gaze lingered at his accounts, as if between the lines filled with numbers and estimates, he was debating how much he wanted to tell them. The man’s hand brushed over the parchment, an unconscious move to obscure the ledger’s details.

A bargeman had said, exasperated, “Look, I know you elves live thousands of years, but in my humble decades of working this river, my cut of the profit has rarely been this low.” He grumbled, “Extra inspections, extra tariffs, extra this, extra that, what, do I look like a dwarf? Do I look like I’m made of gold?” He added, “They act like we’re smuggling something other than fine wine and spices.”

The scouts glanced at each other. Extra regulations were not necessarily unusual, and men were known to complain about trivial things in their short lives. This could be nothing, or perhaps, Dorwinion and Rhûn were tightening their control over the commerce in the region.

As they thanked the bargeman and turned away, they overheard a conversation between two porters.

“Damn, I almost threw out my back for that one job.”

“Whatever, you old man.”

“Hey! It wasn’t an easy job. The guy had at least a dozen bags and chests. Heavy as hell, not to mention the ones that belonged to his lady friend. What the hell do they do over there in the east?”

“Don’t they have servants for those kinds of things?”

“Nah, it was just two of them along with a manservant and a handmaid. Kind of weird to think of it, yeah, but maybe they’re eloping. They left in a real hurry.”

“With two others in tow?!”

“Not my place to judge. Whatever floats their boat.” A round of snickers.

“Although, the lady didn’t seem quite happy, almost like she didn’t want to be there. Kept looking back at the docks as she got in the boat.”

“Huh, well, dunno about that. We don’t get paid enough for this shit as it is.”

Aeglas narrowed his eyes. A nobleman or merchant leaving in a hurry with a minimal retinue and a reluctant companion. Could the companion be her? Coincidence? Maybe.

But when had they ever been given the luxury of coincidence? Did they elope as the porters had suggested, or did something in the east push them out? Regardless, he and his team had to press on.

He turned to the others. “Let’s find Celdir, send a brief report to His Majesty, which should arrive in a half-day’s time, and leave Esgaroth.”

They found the red-headed Silvan, who seemed to have recovered some of his strength. After penning a brief message to the king and tying the parchment to the falcon, they set off, following the Long Lake south as it flowed into the Celduin.

As the stench of the Mannish settlement faded behind them, the air over the lake was cooler, crisper, stilling in the scouts with a clarity that had been buried beneath the timber and markets.

Saeroth drawled, “So that was a great use of time. Learned plenty there, like the best whorehouses in town.”

Aeglas gave him a pointed look. “And will you be frequenting them when we return?”

Saeroth yelped, personally offended, “Valar no! Why would I tie myself to those creatures? I’d rather kiss a councilor’s boots.”

Tirloth replied, as if she were trying to justify why they did not waste a whole morning slumming around, “We obtained some information, with the delayed shipments and increased barge tariffs. At least that gives us an idea of the lands ahead.”

Aeglas hummed, “Hard to say, could be just business as usual. Regardless, we’ll need to exercise every caution from here on forward. While Dorwinion trades with us, we’re not exactly allies. We will have to assume everyone we meet is hostile until proven otherwise.”

Sure, the findings from the merchants and bargemen were unusual, and their demeanors had suggested they were afraid of saying too much, that perhaps they were hiding something. But when has trade never been risky? When have Men never reacted with some degree of secrecy and distrust? It was not as if this was the first time Dorwinion wine shipments were delayed; they happened not infrequently, and they either ended up arriving a week or two late, or the merchants compensated the realm handsomely for the error.

And that conversation between the porters? Pure speculation between two half-drunkards who couldn’t put two and two together on a good day.

Yes, that’s all that was. Business as usual.

***

Thranduil sighed. It was business as usual. Although Tatharel’s disappearance was…tragic, as one councilor had put it—in truth, it felt like a part of his fëa was ripped out—the realm did not cease to function. There were still treaties to negotiate, budgets to balance, and disputes to settle.

His hand grazed over the dark ink of the councilors’ reports, replete with poorly reasoned arguments, short-sighted conclusions, and sometimes, even missing numbers. Where there should have been red ink, sharp and decisive, there was only empty space, like the Last Desert on the map in the council chamber.

He realized that beyond whatever relationship they had or did not have, she was integral to Greenwood’s governance. In fact, she had molded the realm’s economic and diplomatic backbone.

After the war that had ended the last Age, they had returned with a little over a third of their army and were forced to rebuild. For the first few decades of his reign, the guilt and grief of his father’s death at Dagorlad paralyzed him. Doubt plagued his every decision, if this was the decision that would doom them again. The long shadows of that terrible war, the dead air of the plains of Mordor, the legions and legions of orcs and other foul creatures haunted his dreams.

She, still recovering from an arrow wound to the back, had wordlessly picked up the mundane tasks of allocating budgets, setting taxation policies, and rebuilding trade agreements, the things that no one else wanted to do because they were boring, because they were tedious. There were songs sung of valor on the battlefield, but what minstrel would compose a lay for a layered trading strategy?

At the time, she told him, “I’ve had plenty of experience picking up after royalty—when Thingol fell, when Dior died and Doriath was sacked, when Elwing cast herself into the sea. You see? Plenty of experience.”

He had smiled. “If I recall correctly, we were at the harbor when you said some rather undignified things about Elwing.”

“Yes. I called her a reckless child. She was thirty and five: old enough to wed, old enough to bear children. Yet she doomed us all. I carried her out of Doriath in my own arms, only for her to leave us to burn.”

Her voice softened, and she looked at him, really looked at him. “Because if I don’t do this, no one else will. We have lost much in the war, but that does not mean we should punish the living. We owe it to them to make sure they are fed, with warm homes and a hope for something better.”

She paused and smiled, “Thranduil, wars are won with swords and steel, but if there was a way to win without ever lifting a blade, through economic pragmatism and diplomatic maneuvering, wouldn’t that be better?”

She thought for a moment and then huffed, “But there’s no reasoning with orcs. You can have your steel.”

He remembered the long nights when they worked together in his study, her fingers and wrists dark with ink. Despite having suffered millennia of separation and ruin, she still dreamed of peace and prosperity. And it was no idle musing either, for she had taken it upon herself to rebalance debts and surpluses, redistributing budgets, and orchestrating trade agreements. One treaty at a time, she teased him, as she scrawled red ink in the margins of an incomplete report.

Thranduil leaned back, his eyes distant. Faeron was right, what an exceptional queen she would have made! But now, even if she were found, she would never sit by him amending reports. She would never again address him with that kind of familiarity.

His gaze settled on the parchment that had arrived in the late afternoon. An update from the scouts. Some delays in wine shipment, increased regulations for moving goods, and some inane gossip between porters. Nothing he did not know already.

The story with the reluctant lady did pique his interest. For the tiniest of moments, he wondered, could it be her? Probably not. She had dealt with the men of Esgaroth for centuries. And the raft elves would have noticed. No, it was pure coincidence. It had to be.

He rose and walked to the balcony. The expanse of the forest appeared, blazing red and gold under the setting sun. He breathed in the warm summer air, redolent of pine and honey, even and slow, his fëa extending into the woods, through the leafy boughs, past the Forest River, to the edges of the woods.

There was no sign of her among the harmonies of the trees. Of course not. He strained his fëa, reaching further, hoping to catch even the faintest whisper of her. If he could feel her, she was still within the Music.

Silence. A void.

Then—Something deeper. Beneath the fabric of the world. Beneath the Music that bound them all. Something ancient echoed. A chord thrumming through the air. Not yet a song, not yet a harmony. But it was something.

The fundamental resonance was set.

“Of all the places she could have disappeared, she chose this place,” Saeroth muttered, “where even birds do not fly.”

Few elves had ever traveled east of Esgaroth. Other than those who had business with Dorwinion, there was little reason to travel across the grasslands of the Wilderlands. What lay beyond the Celduin was unknown, and beyond that, the vast Inner Sea of Rhûn remained a mystery.

There, Men reigned—some descended from those who had marched under the banners of The Enemy, others from those who had resisted him. Their language, history, and culture were so distant, so inconsequential, so irrelevant to the elves of the West.

In fact, so little was known about these regions that their Sindarin name Rhûn simply meant east. Nothing more was needed.

And just their luck too.

They had traveled for two days along the Celduin’s banks. The summer sun blazed overhead, and the riverbank, lush with fen grass, wildflower, and willows dipping their branches in the clear water, was a striking novelty for the company.

Celdir ran his hands through the reeds and the wild irises as they made their way through the landscape. He reveled in their fragrance and textures. He smiled as he wiped the pollen from his fingers on his tunic.

They had long dwelled in the forest, under its leafy boughs, which scattered the incoming sunlight into golden mosaics. But here, there was nothing between them and the sky.

Under the full summer light, which gleamed in the river currents, there was a vast, limitless beauty that stretched to the horizon, unconstrained by canopies or branches. A languid beauty curled, unhurried and self-indulgent, a sharp contrast to the urgency of their mission.

Tirloth spoke at last, “They say she was not sent to Dorwinion or Rhûn, so much as she chose to leave.

“She left shortly after His Majesty’s engagement was announced on Mid-year’s Day a century ago.”

The elleth gazed at the expanse of wildflowers, the small blooms of the forget-me-not swaying in the breeze. “I wonder if she saw a similar sight when she traveled east. What did she feel?”

Saeroth let out a sharp breath. “Who can say? Probably disappointment. Anger. Grief. Regret.”

His lips curled into a sardonic smile. “Imagine lingering in Arda for five thousand years, building a kingdom, accompanying His Majesty to war, only for him to pledge himself to another.

“If I were her, I would have faded or sailed out of spite. What I would not have done is undertake a diplomatic assignment to foreign lands.”

Aeglas glanced at his companion. “We cannot all be as principled and noble as you, Saeroth.”

The ellon huffed and rolled his eyes.

Celdir, still lost in his admiration of the landscape, exclaimed, “There are so many flowers and plants we do not have in Greenwood! If only we could take some home, maybe plant them along the banks of the Forest River.”

“If you want to play gardener on our return journey, feel free to indulge your whims,” Saeroth drawled.

Aeglas added, “We are on a mission. Do not forget it.”

Celdir ducked his head, a sheepish smile spreading across his face.

“As beautiful as the land is,” Saeroth narrowed his eyes, scanning the riverbanks and meadows, “where are the animals?”

The land did not answer him.

His companions halted, listening.

Indeed, there should have been the calls of the waterfowls among the reeds, the fluttering of wings as they took flight. Where was the buzzing of the cicadas perched on willow and alder trees? Where was the hum of dragonflies’ iridescent wings as they darted above the grasses?

Gone. There was only the rustle of the sedge against the wind.

Aeglas looked at the river, relaxed and meandering. His brows creased. “Even the river is quiet.”

The water flowed over the rocks, parting and merging, yet without splashes, without gurgles, without sound.

The river flowed, but it did not sing.

Celdir offered, “Maybe the animals are hiding to avoid the sun.”

The other three exchanged glances.

“Maybe,” said Tirloth, her tone neutral but her eyes betraying her skepticism.

They lingered for a moment longer, straining to hear a chirp, a hum, a buzz—anything.

The land remained silent. There was only the wind.

Saeroth spoke at last, half-hearted, as if he were trying to convince himself as much as the others, “Maybe it is the sun and the heat.”

No one believed him.

There was no music here.

Did the Valar’s grace even extend to these lands?

Yes. It had to.

Their leader broke the silence. “We should keep moving while we still have the light.”

As they resumed their journey along the Celduin, the silence deepened.

***

Tirloth was the first to see it.

They had been following the river’s course for several days now. The marshland and meadows faded into grasslands and poplar groves. In the distance, they could see fishing villages dotting the shore and barges laden with crates and barrels gliding upstream.

“Wait,” she breathed, raising her hand, palm opened. “There is something on the banks ahead. No motion.”

They slowed their pace, and when they arrived at the scene, they were greeted by a sight that was decadent and obscene.

Rich silks and brocades spilled amongst the river grass. Amongst them were strewn large pieces of splintered wood, likely the containers for such finery. Also gleaming under the sun were gems, deep emeralds and rubies the sizes of bird eggs and bright pearls as large as grapes.

“By the Valar,” Celdir began, “this must be worth kingdoms.” He drew in a shaky breath and looked at the older elves. “And it is all just…lying here by the river?”

Tirloth tilted her head, assessing the nearly absurd scene. Her voice was even and measured. “It looks to me like whoever was carrying these, perhaps a merchant, was in a hurry to get rid of them.”

She paused.

“How else do you justify throwing away something this exorbitant?”

Saeroth frowned, considering. “It does not seem like bandits either, because they would have taken all of this.”

A breath.

“But what would force them to abandon their wares?”

“Perhaps they were ferrying something they were not meant to carry.” They turned to look at Aeglas. “You remember the bargeman’s words at Esgaroth? That there were more inspections coming out of Dorwinion and Rhûn.”

“Bah, Men and their never-ending grievances. Always looking to earn a quick coin,” Saeroth grumbled. But even he could not deny the possibility in the other ellon’s words.

Aeglas continued, “Dorwinion and Rhûn could be tracking barges up the Celduin and selecting certain ones for further inspection.”

He glanced back at the items on the ground, “These silks and gems would have entered Ennor through Esgaroth and eventually made their ways to the markets of Gondor or Rohan.”

Saeroth added, “I bet a few would have entered His Majesty’s coffers as well.”

The others stared at him for his irreverence.

“What? A king deserves fine silks and jewels.”

At last, Celdir exclaimed, “So you think this is a smuggling operation?”

“Shhh, not so loud!” Saeroth whispered back. “Sound carries over the water and grasses. Do you want everyone on the river to know?”

“Speaking of others,” the elleth looked at the river, “there is a barge approaching.”

Aeglas stepped in. “All right, so Saeroth and I will attempt to see what we can learn from the bargemen. Celdir, you and Tirloth hide in the grasses in case we need reinforcements.”

“But—” Celdir started.

The older ellon shot him a look. “Saeroth knows several languages, which is helpful. A group of four would attract too much attention. Go now.”

The young ellon and Tirloth disappeared into the grasses.

Aeglas turned to the Sindarin ellon. “We are brothers traveling to Dorwinion and Rhûn for work. Do not blow our cover.”

Saeroth rolled his eyes and adjusted his hair to cover his pointed ears. “Yes, yes, if you insist. Though I fail to see the resemblance.”

He was met with an unamused stare.

The barge was a simple craft, a wooden plank with a long and wide deck upon which barrels and crates were stacked. A single mast with a square sail rose and billowed gently in the wind. Several men were on the deck under a canvas awning that shaded them from the humid heat.

At the helm, a graying pilot manned a crude rudder. Deep folds that told of the passing of the years lined his face. He wore a lightweight tunic, knee-length breeches, and a wide-brimmed hat woven from river reeds.

As the vessel drifted towards them, Aeglas and Saeroth approached, wearing easy, friendly smiles.

“Good day!” Aeglas called out in Westron.

The pilot glanced over, an unreadable expression settling in his eyes. The men under the awning muttered something in a foreign tongue, a blend of Westron syllables and something unknown.

Saeroth greeted them in halting imitation, “Good day! How fares your journey? We’re brothers traveling to Dorwinion in search of work.”

The pilot’s face paled. The muttering ceased.

The man turned away from them, and rather than slowing the barge, he yelled to the men who took their positions by long oars.

“Wait—” Saeroth tried again, urgency bleeding into his voice.

The bargeman did not pay him any attention. He continued to bark orders. The air filled with sounds of oar handles creaking against their rests.

The wind surged. The sails swelled, propelling the vessel further upstream. It disappeared around a bend.

Aeglas called out to his companions hiding in the grass, “You can come out now.”

Saeroth exhaled, “Ah, a most illuminating encounter.”

Their leader thought for a moment and said, “It is difficult to say for certain when we understand so little of their tongue, but the mention of Dorwinion seemed to unsettle them. They began rowing soon after.”

“Do you think it ties back to the silks and jewels?” Tirloth suggested.

Aeglas shrugged. “Possibly. They might have mistaken us for inspectors.”

Silence.

Then, Saeroth observed, “At least they are still making trips up the Celduin.”

His gaze sharpened. “But what in the Valar is happening in Dorwinion?”

No one spoke for a moment.

Aeglas shifted his stance, his voice quiet. “Whatever it is, they do not want us knowing.”

He exhaled. “Then again, Men are a superstitious folk.”

His eyes followed the fading silhouette of the barge. “We will not know until we see it for ourselves.”

Turning back, he took note of his companions—Saeroth, his hand on his dagger handle; Tirloth, her eyes fixed on the lands ahead; Celdir, his feet shifting at the settling unease.

Beyond them stretched long, empty grasslands, the hush of the Celduin curling alongside them, the distant smudge of smoke from some unseen fire.

“On your guard. Something about these lands is…wrong.” His voice was low and steady. “I cannot say what, but—”

The wind shifted. Tall grasses bent under the current.

Aeglas’s words withered in his throat.

No one spoke.

No one had anything left to say.

***

When the night deepened, Thranduil withdrew her letters from the lacquered box tucked in a hidden compartment of his desk. Other than her final letter which rested close to his heart beneath his robes, they numbered over two hundred, including those she had written him before she had left for Dorwinion and Rhûn, when she still loved him freely.

Over the past century, she had written often, as duty demanded. Many of those letters were filed in the royal archives. But the ones that mattered, he kept close.

He was careful as he parsed through the sheafs, the last true memento she left him. Some of the parchment, inked with Menegroth’s poetry or Harlindon’s laughter, threatened to dissolve at the first hint of careless handling.

Thranduil,

A new verse for you:

Evening, you who bring all that bright dawn scattered.
Would that you gathered me among them.

Yours,
Tatharel

He traced her letters, as if this was the only way that he could hold onto her. Truly, she was Daeron’s finest student. Her script at the time was young, untested by the millennia of strife and grief. But even then, the sharp, angled stems of her letters belied a quiet steel that would be honed by the subsequent years.

She had smiled when he asked her about her writing. “Thranduil, just as your sword is an extension of yourself, my letters are an extension of myself. It is a manifestation of our will, of how we present ourselves to the world.”

She had always said things like that, bold yet elusive words laced with hidden meanings that left him flustered and uncertain how to respond. He was young then, newly arrived at Menegroth and unsure of his place within court, with its grand hierarchies, rigid etiquette, and complex, shifting alliances. She cut through all of the noise. She was good at things like that.

Something in his chest ached. Her words flickered through his mind, and he felt like he was trying to catch water with open palms—a futile task.

She had written of the evening gathering what was lost.

But now, she was scattered to the winds. He too wished he could gather her in his arms as he had once done and see her deep green eyes gazing up at him with laughter and affection.

He let him linger this fanciful daydream. If only for a moment. That she was still here in his halls, beside him, that he had wed her, that she had been queen, that she had never left.

The moment passed.

He could only hope that his scouts retrieved her.

Thranduil turned his attention to her three letters prior to her disappearance. In the last six days, he had read them over and over again, committing the words inked in silver to memory.

With her letters, she also sent trade reports and ledger summaries: tallies of exports, quantities, payments, tariffs, and other associated costs. As these documents sometimes were presented to the council, she did not write in their shared cipher. Nevertheless, as a safety measure and out of an overriding sense of caution, she wrote in Cirth, that runic script standardized by her tutor.

He smiled at the memory. Millennia ago, when he was still prince and she was an advisor in his father’s court, he had asked her why she was using that obsolete, angular hand.

She huffed, “Prince Thranduil, just because you do not appreciate Cirth, does not make it obsolete.”

He looked at her for a heartbeat and said, “It has been out of use for centuries. Only the Noldor of Eregion use it. And only for formal recording of lore.”

She held up a hand. “It is still alive for those of us who choose to keep it so.” Her eyes narrowed. “And, it serves as an additional safeguard. If these ledgers were to be compromised—say, by the Númenoreans who can read Tengwar—Greenwood would be left exposed.”

He peered at her. “If the Númenoreans are near our borders, I think we have more pressing concerns than compromised ledgers.”

Tatharel rolled her eyes. “You understand my point. No one except those of us with proper history and refinement” she paused deliberately, “and memory of Doriath, will be able to read these documents.”

She gestured to the runes. “Which in my opinion, makes them rather secure.”

Letting the silence linger, she regarded him with that endearingly familiar amusement in her gaze. “At least be glad I am not writing in reconstructed Sarati.”

The vision of her in Amon Lanc beneath the summer eaves, her green eyes bright with laughter, faded. All that remained were the ledgers she had sent from Dorwinion.

There were columns of numbers, some dark and official, others in red and speculative, the result of her interpolations. Of course, the numbers she had received from her Rhûnish hosts were often incomplete, perhaps even falsified, and he had no doubt she labored tirelessly to reconstruct them, drawing them as close to the truth as possible.

If nothing else, she entrusted Greenwood—and him—with truth.

He glanced at the margins, where she had noted her observations in precise and formal runes.

Exports show a marked decrease, up to a sixth of expected. Yet no reports of poor harvests. Will confirm with vintners. Who benefits from this imbalance?

And of course, she had outlined the supporting calculations, presenting best- and worst-case projections to justify her estimates.

Thranduil sighed. He missed her presence in his halls, an absence that had festered for a hundred years. He continued reading, hoping to see if there was anything in her correspondence that might hint at her whereabouts.

An unusual rise in futures contract on wine—less so than silk or spice, but still present. Prices are increased well before shipments leave the vineyards, but actual deliveries remain low.

Speculation driving artificial scarcity? Or attempt to pressure vintners into more contracts before realizing the full value of their yields? Will reassess.

At the end of the ledger that accompanied her penultimate letter, she wrote,

The reconstructed numbers are reasonable; I am confident in my estimates. Yet, the Men’s silences do not lie. This is more than mismanagement or incompetence. I will revisit my assumptions in greater detail and attempt to gather more information.

He put down her ledgers. They were well-written of course, a blend of her relentless pursuit for empirical truth with her intuition. But they offered little beyond what her letters had already contained.

Had he not driven her away, had she still trusted him before all this theater, would she have left him something more? Something that could lead him back to her?

If you had not failed her so completely, she would have never left.

Thranduil stood, his robes cascading in a sharp, fluid motion. He strode toward the door of his study, as if he could escape the voice in his mind, as if he could flee the gnawing guilt hollowing him from the inside out.

It was late. The corridors were empty.

Without realizing where he was going, so swift his feet carried him that he almost flew down the halls, towards the western wing of his palace.

He only came to his senses when the doors to her chambers appeared in front of him, rooms that he had not entered for a century. Since that ill-fated council meeting. Since his engagement to Ithildis was announced, and she had swept from the meeting chambers with a look of betrayal and a tepid congratulations.

The door was simple, minimally adorned with silver filigrees, stripped bare of the memories and promises they once shared. It loomed before him, austere and heavy, a mausoleum built on finality and silence. Yet, something called to him, a tantalizing whisper of forbidden things, echoing in unresolved harmonies.

His hand rested on the brass handle. A fine layer of dust clung to it, undisturbed, like the century of estrangement between them.

No. He should not do this. A hundred years ago, she had made it clear a that she wanted nothing from him aside from her duty as his courtier and envoy. And yet here he was, at her door, about to violate one of the few personal—intimate—havens she had carved away from him.

Perhaps, just perhaps, when she had returned to Greenwood for his wedding two years past, when she had stayed in this room for a single solitary night, she had left something behind. Something that might help him now.

In his mind, he whispered an apology, one of many he owed her.

Then, he crossed the threshold.

***

They were now two-thirds of their way to Dorwinion. It was late afternoon when they arrived at a village. A thick fog rolled in, cloaking the sharp outlines of the farmhouses’ sloped roofs and wheelbarrows abandoned along the roadside. The world thinned into shifting shapes of light and dark, flickering at the edges, but never becoming quite real.

For the last day, the sky was sunless, and a grey overcast lingered. The Celduin flowed, silent as it had been.

Something creaked in the distance, likely a broken fence swinging on a rusty hinge.

“So…” Celdir began, his eyes darting at the haze, vague shapes drifting in and out of relief. Even his elven eyesight could not pierce the gloom. “Where is everyone?”

Tirloth swept her gaze over the scene. “Mannish settlements are rarely this silent,” she said, her voice soft and tinged with uncertainty.

“It is only late afternoon. The people should be tending to the fields. Let us keep moving—see if there is anyone nearby,” their leader suggested. “But stay close. This fog makes it hard to see others, and we do not want to be caught unaware.”

“For the love of the Valar, let us be done with this. I hate this place already.” Saeroth vocie was low, but the scowl on his face spoke plainly enough. Whatever lay ahead, it was far beyond what he had bargained for.

The scouts swept through the small village, using the murkiness and their elven levity to cloak their presence.

Nothing. No sound, no motion, no people.

Just a half-written ledger in an inn, the ink pooling where the quill rested against the page. A half-drunk glass of wine in a pub, the dark spill still on the ground. A pitchfork stuck in a bale of hay, as if someone had meant to return for it but never did.

“It is almost as if they just…vanished,” Celdir whispered, eyes wide. He did not believe in spirits, but there was just no other explanation.

“Yes,” the elleth murmured, “no signs of struggle. No brawls or any obvious bloodstains. No bodies either.”

Aeglas tilted his head, contemplative. “If it were bandits, you would expect fighting, bloodshed, and corpses. But there is none of that.”

He let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. “So what could have caused these people to leave?

“Slavers?” He mused but shook his head. “Would have still expected to see signs of struggles.”

“Shhh—there is someone ahead!” Saeroth hissed and gestured to a figure not too far in the distance, its edges shifting with the fog.

The scouts, in their fervor to hopefully find some explanation for the strange disturbances they had witnessed on their journey along the Celduin, crept forward, hiding in the shadows, their blades and arrows drawn.

As they approached the figure, its shape began to clarify. It was Mannish in stature; they could make out a round face wearing a pointed straw hat and four limbs, splayed out as if he were mimicking an eagle’s wings.

The arms and legs were bent at grotesque angles. The most disturbing thing about the figure was the way its hands and feet moved, flapping against the wind, as if writhing against invisible chains, while the rest of it hung perfectly still.

Fear and adrenaline pounding in their throats, the scouts edged closer. When they were about a few yards from the figure, Aeglas lunged forward, blade poised at its neck.

The figure did not move.

A canvas face stared back, sewn pumpkin seeds for eyes and a button for a nose.

He blinked.

It was a scarecrow.

“Mother-loving son of an orc,” Saeroth cursed. He took a step back. “No, no—this is beyond me” He took a few breaths, deep and wheezing, trying to quell his stomach before it betrayed him.

Celdir turned to Tirloth. “I am glad I brought an extra set of breeches,” he whispered. The elleth smiled sympathetically in return.

Aeglas frowned. “But it still does not explain where all of the residents were taken.”

Saeroth shrugged. “Who knows? But what I do know,” he enunciated each syllable, “Is that I am leaving this cursed place at once.”

His scowl deepened. “This whole mission has been one wretched surprise after another.”

Their tracker was hesitant. “Perhaps there is more to uncover here,” she offered. “We may have overlooked something in the fog.”

Saeroth whirled to face her. “You welcome to stay for as long as you please. I am leaving. I will see you ahead.”

Aeglas sighed. “Saeroth is not wrong. There are too many unknowns here. Even if we have yet to encounter anyone, that could change at any moment.”

He paused. “And it is difficult to say whether they will be friend or foe.” His comment lingered in the air for a moment.

“Besides, we must press on to reach Dorwinion in time. Let us go.”

Celdir and Saeroth were only too happy to oblige.

As the fog-enshrouded village disappeared behind them, Tirloth gazed back for a brief moment. For some reason, a feeling she could not quite name, there was a surreality to what they had just experienced, a dreaminess where the edges of reality and fantasy melded, a distorted plane where resonances and overtones clamored, strident, haunting…

She shuddered. It was that cursed fog. May Dorwinion would be better.

***

Her chambers were just as he had remembered.

Clean. Neat. Untouched.

Waiting.

The faintest trace of old parchment and ink lingered in the air, a ghost of her presence. Dust clung to every surface, undisturbed.

Her canopied bed rested in a corner, its frame carved from fine beech and moss-green covers made neatly as if she would be returning that evening. Her wardrobe was nearby, containing embroidered gowns of muted shades for various occasions.

Across the room was her writing desk, the only piece of grand furniture that she spared herself, spanning half the length of her chambers. Stacked on it were ledgers, reports, quills, and inks along with her silver inkstand. In one corner rested a silken letterbox containing old letters and personal amusements, trinkets she had collected over the millennia.

Lining the far wall, tall bookcases rose toward the vaulted ceilings. A ladder leaned against them, ever ready if she wished to retrieve a treatise on trade strategies or political philosophy.

And finally, her window, a wide, arched pane of the finest glass from Near Harad, a magnificent view that overlooked the Forest River and was not second even to his. In front of the expansive vista was an upholstered chaise lounge and a small tea table for refreshments as well as a place to set her parchment and quill.

He stilled, his eyes soft. She had never cared for ostentatious luxury, favoring instead a quiet, deliberate refinement, from the braids of her hair all the way to her bedsheets.

His gaze lingered on her desk. Reports, ledgers—all evidence of the thankless centuries she had put into keeping his realm not merely functioning, but prosperous. But now, they sat untouched, awaiting an owner who may not return.

And of course, they told him nothing of where she was now.

Thranduil’s eyes caught a stray piece of parchment. One of her linguistic forays. Before everything fell apart, on a night like this, she told him she was working on a reconstruction of Common Eldarin.

A memory surfaced. A night spent in this very room, long before the weight of duty turned bitter between them. The bureaucracy had, for once, been swift. He had lounged in that upholstered chaise and traced idle patterns along her arm as she rested against him.

As expected, she could never be unoccupied, so she picked up her work on Common Eldarin.

She sighed, half-distant, “Thranduil, as we all know, the pluralization in Common Eldarin is simply achieved by adding a final i. So tawar becomes tawari.”

He smiled and indulged her. “Yes, as we all know.”

She looked at him like he was a particularly slow elfling.

Tatharel continued, “Yet, the final i shifted the proximal short vowels first, then spread through i-affection, and lastly—”

He was not truly listening anymore. Not to the meaning of her words, at least, but to the way she spoke, the way her lips curved around each word, the way her fingers traced delicate patterns on the parchment.

“A simple concept. But there are certain words that have lost their syllables. For instance, ôl as we know it was olo in Old Sindarin, yet its plural form is ely, suggesting that pluralization preserved the original ending.”

He knew better than to engage with her when she was in one of her moods.

“But, there are also words such as fang whose plural is feng, but come from the Common Eldarin word spanga, implying that the shift occurred through an intermediate stage after Common Eldarin.

“So how can we ascertain the rules governing which words belong to each category?”

She turned to face him. With a teasing smile, she tapped him on the nose, her green eyes inches away from his.

“I know you are simply enthralled by this discussion on phonemic and morphologic evolution.”

He smiled and tucked a stray strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “Yes, absolutely fascinating.” His breath was hot against her ear.

She stilled, distracted by his closeness. In the dim light, her pupils dilated, her breath slowed, as if one movement, one exhalation too strong would shatter this moment.

She leaned in, drawn by something she dared not name, her lips a hairsbreadth away from his. She could see herself reflected in those pale silver-blue eyes, wide-eyed, breathless, flushed.

His lips, close and waiting. Lips which she had kissed without hesitation in an Age past.

Her body, the wildness of her heartbeat, and the fire in her lungs growing tighter and tighter, like an arrow drawn taut the moment before release.

Then, a thought surfaced, cool and sobering. She caught herself and pulled away.

Thranduil tried to quell his disappointment.

“Anyways…” her voice faltered for a moment, perhaps because there was a dangerously handsome Elvenking at her side.

“As I was saying, I wish Adar were here. He would know. After all, he spoke these tongues, all the way from Common Eldarin on the Great Journey to the Doriathrin Sindarin in Thingol’s court.”

She let out a quiet laugh. “I miss him. I hope he is well across the Sea, enjoying Alqualondë.”

Thranduil said nothing. What could he say? They both had lost too much.

His mother, to the Second Kinslaying. His father, on the plains of Mordor.

Her mother, to fading. Her father, to the white ships of their Telerin ancestors after Dagor Rûth.

Even across centuries and millennia, the pain never vanished. At first, it struck with a fëa-rending strength, then dulled to a lingering ache, ever present.

So, he simply placed his hand on top of hers. A silent reminder that they were here, in Greenwood, that what they had built together was real.

She turned to face him again, her eyes shedding their usual sharpness. Only soft nostalgia remained.

“You know,” she began, “if fate had been kinder, if Menegroth had stood,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “I think I would have been a loremaster, spending my days lost in languages.”

She laughed, mischievous, “Who knows? Perhaps I may have even rivaled Pengolodh of Gondolin!”

Thranduil exhaled, long-suffering but fond. “Please, do not subject me to your discourses on morphologic evolutions and consonantal mutations,”

Yet the glint in his eyes betrayed him, that he would follow her to the ends of the world, even if he had to endure her endless lectures on phonemic drifts!

So entranced was he in his reverie that he did not hear the sound of footsteps behind him.

“Your Majesty.”

The half-dream, half-memory dissolved into the night.

He turned. It was Ithildis.

She smiled, gentle and proper. “It is late.”

He looked at her. Any emotions that may have surfaced in his eyes withered the instant she spoke.

Ithildis continued, “Lady Tatharel’s disappearance is tragedy to Greenwood. I pray to the Valar that our scouts will bring her home soon.”

Liar. Ithildis would have preferred if Tatharel disappeared forever, as a footnote forgotten by a careless scribe.

“In preparation for her return home, with your permission, Your Majesty, I would like to arrange for the servants to clean her room. It has certainly become quite dust—”

“No.” His words cut through the night air, sharp like his blades.

“But I am sure—”

He turned on his queen, that title misplaced and revolting.

“What part of no do you not understand?” His voice was low and dangerous, its edge bleeding with near ferality.

“I was only trying to help,” she replied, as if she had been struck.

Silence stretched.

He started to head for the door.

“Your Majesty.” Soft. Pleading. He stopped and looked at her.

Hesitant, Ithildis began, her eyes lowered and tears starting to form at the edge of her lashes. “I know Lady Tatharel was very dear to you. And that our union was one of political convenience for our people. I have no illusions about that.”

She raised her eyes to meet his. Expressionless, he gazed back. Her lips trembled.

“But, for the past century, I have watched my husband, the one whom I have wed under the stars before all of Arda, our fëar forever bound, pine for someone they can never have.”

Her voice rose. “What of me, Thranduil?”

“Do not call me that,” he hissed.

“What about me? Your wife. Your queen. Have you ever spared a thought for how I have felt? Do you know what they say about me?” Her voice trembled with suppressed fury.

“How can I lift my head in court when I am competing with a ghost?” Her words tumbled out of her like poison.

She laughed, mirthless. “I know you have no love for me, nor do I expect it, but I ask that you at least give me the honor that I am due.”

He held her gaze for a moment longer.

“And you will. As etiquette demands.” His words sliced her without mercy, without pretense that this entire arrangement was anything more than a crude pantomime. A farce. And they, its not unwilling actors.

Ithildis’s lashes glistened with tears. Hoping, just hoping, that he could part with some infinitesimal shred of warmth for her. Something pure, undiluted. Just for her.

He did not.

“Good night, Queen Ithildis.” His voice was cool, unyielding. “No one shall set foot in this chamber, lest they face exile. Depart now.”

He swept out of the room.

Ithildis half-ran, half-stumbled after him.

The door closed behind her. A sealed mausoleum.

***

Despite Tirloth’s hopes, things did not improve as they drew closer to Dorwinion. In fact, if anything they got worse.

It had been eight days since they departed His Majesty’s halls, and they were only a few miles from the city.

The landscape along the Celduin had changed once again: the fishing villages and poplar groves were replaced with golden hills lush with vineyards and orchards. The scent of sun-kissed grapes and ripening figs drifted through the air, lazy and slow. Large bushes lining the riverbanks were heavy with blackberries and wild plums that promised sweetness. A note of something warm and earthy—perhaps the earth baked in the summer heat or the beginnings of fermentation—lingered.

In the distance, some hundred yards away, rose the the luxurious villas of Dorwinion merchants and Rhûnish lords. Their pale limestone façades gleamed in the afternoon sun, a sharp contrast against the deep burnt terracotta tiles of their roofs. They were too far off for a Man to see clearly, but the scouts with their elven eyesight discerned delicate iron-wrought gates, shaded colonnades of fluted columns adorned with acanthus leaves, and gentle fountains sending fine sprays of water that refracted the light.

It was a sight utterly foreign to the scouts. Yes, His Majesty’s halls were a grandeur to behold, but it was carved into the heart of a mountain. Despite elven and dwarven ingenuity that let in sunlight into the king’s halls, the palace was still dark in places, a kingdom of stone and quiet dusk. It could never compare to the openness of these Dorwinion mansions.

Here, the structures greeted the air without reservation. These villas, like the land itself, seemed to subsist on the sky, light, and water.

“It is beautiful here.” Celdir’s eyes flickered over the golden landscape. These were sights few elves had beheld, and he lamented his lack of skill with the brush. Had he been a better painter, he might have captured these rolling hills and distant mansions in oil—a scene exquisite enough, perhaps, to grace His Majesty’s collection.

They had paused briefly to take in the view.

Like a warm embrace, the land enveloped them with its idyllic beauty, whispering promises of joy, rest, and peace. Here, there was no war, no suffering. All was forgiven and forgotten beneath its fruit-laden vines…

Aeglas shook his head to try to break the land’s spell. Something about this place was too comfortable. They had all known hardship, especially with the forest growing darker in the past hundred years, and survival never felt like this. Yes, their people were prosperous in an Age past, but he had lived long enough to know that such prosperity was built on endurance, force of will, and continued sacrifice, not on honeyed words promising lavish idleness and easy respite.

But it was so easy to surrender to Dorwinion’s temptations, to drift off into a siesta under the afternoon heat, half-listening to the rustle of the grape leaves in the wind.

His eyelids grew heavy. The sights and sounds curled around him, sweet and indolent, a river of molasses. He straightened his shoulders and forced himself to focus.

“Look at that.” Tirloth’s words snapped everyone out of their reverie.

“Beyond the iron gates.” She tilted her chin in the direction of one of the villas. “Why so many guards?”

They peered through the wrought iron. Dark figures loomed in the shadows of the colonnade, bodies tense and vigilant. Armed. Heavily.

“Surely, they do not require so many to guard mere wine,” Celdir suggested.

No one answered. Then, Tirloth said,

“There. In the vineyards.”

More guards, scattered like aphids among the vines. A lone figure, likely a vineyard worker, shouted something. His voice carried in the wind. His words, a jumble of clipped syllables whose tones rose and fell with the air, remained unintelligible to elven ears. It was not a tongue they had ever heard. Even Saeroth, who at the suggestion of Rhûnish, shook his head.

The guards surrounded the man. One set a hand on the hilt of his blade. Although the words exchanged were lost to them, the meaning was clear: the man had spoken out of turn, and now he was being silenced.

A few moments passed.

The circle of guards loosened. One placed a firm hand on the man’s back and led him away, guiding him toward a building at the vineyard’s edge, its walls of pale limestone and roof of sienna blending into the landscape. They disappeared into its shadowed interior.

The scouts exchanged uneasy glances. The afternoon sun still shone, golden and radiant. A breeze stirred in the vines. The scent of fruits and fermentation lingered, sweet, heady, and unbothered. The land had not changed.

They did not speak. Instead, they added this scene to the long litany of strange occurrences along the Celduin—the silent landscape, the jewels and silks abandoned on the river banks, the disturbing behavior of the bargemen, and the fog-enshrouded village.

As they covered the final miles to Dorwinion, the sweetness in the air grew heavier, its weight settling on their tongues and senses. Celdir thought it reminded him of a hunted animal left to rot in the heat.

The views grew grander. The dirt path turned into finely laid cobblestone that was flanked by laurel hedges pruned by a careful hand. Aqueducts towered overhead, arched ingenuities bearing water from the Inner Sea of Rhûn to the city and its vast vineyards. Entourages draped in brilliant silks passed by, their delicate golden bangles chiming with movement. Along the roadside, merchants hawked incense, perfume, and foreign trinkets. Near their feet, colorful birds of royal blue, their long iridescent trains shimmering in the light, bobbed their crested heads as they picked at fallen seeds between cobblestones.

Yet, all the luxuries lining the city entrance did nothing to prepare them for the wretchedness within.

The sweet scent thickened, in the heart of the city.

Gaunt, hollow-cheeked and glassy-eyed people lined every street, more dead than alive. Coughing, phlegmatic and wet. Wheezing. Soft moaning—by those who still had the strength to make sounds. Gauze-wrapped figures slumped against the walls, their bandages weeping crimson, yellow, and green. Their exposed limbs bloomed with strange markings, bruises, and even open flesh.

“By the Valar,” Saeroth breathed, not too deeply, for the air was tainted with filth and decay.

“Watch your step.” Aeglas’s voice was grim.

Celdir hesitated and then stepped over a pile of something unidentifiable—yellow, gelatinous, and glistening in the afternoon heat.

In the alleys behind ornate bathhouses of polished teakwood and gambling dens gilt with ivory, the sick and indigent lingered.

A mother tore apart a dried stale loaf of bread and rationed tiny pieces to her children, who held the scraps in their mouths for as long as possible before swallowing. A tattered figure lay under a wall corner, a long thin pipe resting between yellowed fingers, smoke curling from his mouth, eyes vacant, expression euphoric. A body, motionless, unwrapped, pale and rigid.

A flicker of movement crossed the scouts’ path.

A young man, perhaps no more than twenty, although it was difficult to tell beneath his unkempt hair, pockmarked skin, and sunken eyes.

The scouts stepped back, hands twitching for their hidden weapons.

He turned to face them. A manic craze danced in his pupils, too large, too dark, swallowing the whites of his eyes. He stumbled forward—a jerky, ataxic gait. As he was about to take another step, he clutched at his abdomen and moaned, a raw, wrenching sound, as if his bowels were being torn apart.

He collapsed.

His body convulsed. A wet sound escaped from his lips as he writhed, his hips bent and his leg kicking the air in a futile attempt to curb the pain.

The scouts stared, unsure what to do.

Without warning, his neck snapped sideways and he retched, partly on his dirtied tunic, partly on the cobblestone. His body went still.

Despite their centuries of training, an instinct older than memory screamed at them to run. They came to retrieve an envoy, an elleth precious to their king beyond all measures. Not to stare into the abyss of a land forsaken by the Valar. Not to witness horrors so profane that their fëar trembled to escape the very bounds of Arda.

Celdir looked like he might retch onto the paved cobblestone. For once, Saeroth did not mock him. His usual sardonic wit was absent.

Tirloth, their ever keen-eyed tracker, gazed at the horrors surrounding her, sights of suffering and desolation forever imprinted onto her being.

Did Tatharel linger here? Bound by duty to Greenwood’s economic and diplomatic agenda, forced to witness the depths of Mannish depravity? How did she endure all this?

What if her captors had discarded her, left her to rot in an alley, like one of the wrapped figur—

No. That thought was too much to bear.

The Dorwinion wine no longer tasted as it once had. Now, it was sweeter, cloying with decay, desecration, and death.

“Let us find an inn for the night,” Aeglas’s voice was tight, struggling for the detachment expected of His Majesty’s scouts.

As they moved deeper into the city, they passed a wealthy merchant stepping from his carriage. Without a second glance, the man stepped over a long-expired body as if it did not exist. A fragment of conversation in patchy Westron floated by.

“One dose is all it takes.” Laughter, careless, indulgent, as if he had uttered some inane jest. “Business is good.”

Imperceptible to mortal eyes, the elves stiffened. These were not sights made for elven eyes. This was sacrilege against the Music of the world.

Then, a cold thought wormed into their marrow: had Eru turned away from these silent lands?

***

The sky burned. White-hot, like a brand, a thought flickered absently.

She licked her lips. Chapped, cracked at the edges. Her throat was dry. She parted her mouth, trying to drink moisture from the wind. But even by the water, the air stung.

Everything came in fractured shards, flashing at odd angles, half-reality, half-illusions.

The water. She heard the waves lapping. She turned her head. The Sea. Would she ever see the Seas of the West again?

The thought passed.

Behind her, the baying of humped beasts. Hooves against dry earth, kicking up dust, arrhythmic.

A swirl of unknown tongues.

In the distance, a crack. A whip?

A sound. A laugh? A scream?

Her mind spun. Images came too fast. Yet, her feet moved, carrying her forward.

Silver-blue eyes. Esgalduin. Thranduil.

Will he come?

No. A lost cause. No need for a mere envoy.

She had already said goodbye.

Still, she tilted her head ever so slightly. Gazing back.

Just hills and the horizon.

Lamplight. Menegroth. A dance.

Him.

His hands. Steady. Warm.

She blinked.

Salt flats. Shrubs. Endless emptiness.

Everything was distorted now.

All overtones, no Music.

Nothing left to hold her.

"Report, let us see what everyone has scraped up,” Aeglas said, his voice weary with the expectation of disappointment. They settled around a low square wooden table, one of whose legs was slightly shorter than the others. Celdir, ever eager, leaned his elbows on the wooden surface. The table’s creak split the silence of the night air. Saeroth, still smelling like the dust of the roads and the sweet, putrefying scent of illness and rotting flesh, groaned. 

The inn was tucked away amongst Dorwinion’s back alleys, and the scouts had to be careful in traversing those narrow paths. Carelessness meant stepping into a pile of unidentifiable...goo, or worse, a partially or fully dead body. Celdir nearly screamed when a pallid, wound-ridden hand had wrapped around his ankle earlier that morning. 

Their accommodations certainly were not glamorous, just two bunk beds against a wall with a small, dust-encrusted window. Indeed, the elves were used to much more spacious halls in His Majesty’s palace, or under the vast expanses of the forest when they were in the field. Although their current lodgings fell short of the deep caverns or sunlit glades, importantly, it was discreet. 

Tirloth, her hair wrapped in a deep green head scarf as was local custom and to hide her pointed ears, shook her head, lips tight. “Aeglas and I were in the merchant quarters today. There were too many guards. Too many inspectors. Everyone was tight-lipped and feared speaking too much.” 

Grey eyes reflecting the dim lamplight, Saeroth asked, “Did your cover hold?”

“Yes, and my dear husband even produced some forest herbs and a fake ledger as evidence of our trade as merchants,” the elleth replied, her mirthful eyes slid towards Aeglas. 

Their leader sighed. “Despite our convincing act, fortune did not favor us. Nothing definitive or even suggestive of her whereabouts.”

Saeroth quirked his lips. “Well, as your hired guards, Celdir and I heard something interesting in the taverns today.” 

The other scouts leaned in, eyes bright. 

“Nothing definitive, of course,” the Sinda disclosed quickly. 

Celdir, at this point, had dug his elbows into the table with such enthusiasm that it wobbled dangerously. His crimson hair seemed to flare with a life of its own.

“One of the workers said that a caravan departed eight or nine days ago. Last-minute rush order, paid overtime handsomely. No idea what it carried.” 

Aeglas weighed the words carefully, turning them over in his mind like a pretty coin. Tirloth pursed her lips in thought. 

Something sharp flickered in Saeroth’s eyes. “Patience, young one,” he drawled the vowels, long and slow. “Too eager a pursuit is how you lose the hunt.”

The ellon’s expression turned sheepish, and heat prickled at his collar when he realized he spoke out of turn. 

Saeroth continued, “Anyways, as I was saying, this is all hearsay from a drunk worker. His credibility is limited. Caravans arrive and depart Dorwinion every day. The excessive pay and urgency of departure are interesting, but by themselves, inconclusive.” 

Aeglas nodded. Despite his sardonic and pessimistic nature, Saeroth was right. One caravan departing some days ago without meeting full bureaucratic requirements was odd, but not specific. There was no indication that their envoy would be on it. If that was the sole update he sent to His Majesty, he might as well send his resignation letter along with it.

“Anything else?” He prompted.

“Yes. While a single caravan departing with urgency is no need to raise concern by itself, there was a…” he paused, searching for the right word, “fascinating conversation between two merchants.”

“Oh?”

“One bragged about how he made a large sale, a little under a fortnight past. New patron, a Rhûnish lord whose house had fallen into debt and was selling parts of his estate and heirlooms to fulfill his obligations.”

“Did they say who?” Tirloth, coiled tight, cut in.

“No.”

She leaned back, the tension bleeding out of her form.

“The other inquired about the nature and volume of the sale. The first merchant, despite being many ales in, clams up, as if his lips were glued by tree sap.”

“A little under a fortnight, it would fit with the worker’s words,” Tirloth said. Her brows creased. “Wait. Did His Majesty during the debrief not say that these delegations beyond the desert were entrapping many of the local Rhûnish lords?”

Celdir nodded. “Yes! And if what my uncle says is true, many of these lords are forced to sell off their land, seats of governance, and even their titles to escape the debt. Although this has been known for the better part of the year. How is this relevant now?”

Saeroth took a sip of his cordial flask. “When the second merchant realizes that his partner had said too much, he redirects the conversation. He says, ‘Whatever you sold, it must have been high value. I heard from the others there is an invaluable…’” Saeroth trailed off, imitating the merchant, “‘piece of art on that caravan. For an emperor beyond the desert. There were armed guards, maybe even mercenaries, near that caravan.’”

Aeglas narrowed his eyes. Piece of art? And the way Saeroth said it. A literal work of art? Or a euphemism for something darker? They had seen in the Rhûnish markets that anything could be bought for the right price, even the alive and unwilling. Dread, cold and tight, settled in them.

The captain ran a hand through his hair. Some strands had escaped the neat braids at his temples. The woven locks were beginning to fray, and so was his hope for a meaningful rescue and recovery mission.

Saeroth continued, “The original merchant is now attempting to recover. He laughs, a thin and weak thing. ‘Oh, you know how it is. Precious cargo requires additional insurance and all that.’ His partner appears unconvinced but does not press further.

“Then the merchants started to complain about the regulations and documents surrounding caravan departures. And they wonder how that caravan left so quickly. Apparently, it slipped through the eastern gates before sunrise. And the city guards only gave it a cursory glance before waving it through. Usually, they are like hounds and sniff all over the goods.”

Aeglas stirred. He turned to Tirloth, his wife of convenience. “Do you remember what we heard in the commercial district? That departure inspections were mandatory unless a certificate or seal of noble sponsorship was presented?”

The elleth nodded. “Do you think that the Rhûnish nobles are implicated as well?”

Saeroth quipped, “Or whomever controls them. For instance, through debt.”

Their leader nodded slowly. A plausible tale, when the pieces are placed together, like an image emerging from a sea glass mosaic. Yet, each piece on its own was small, too fragmented, too slippery to hold as evidence itself. It was all overtones of reflections and refractions, not truth proper.

The tracker then said, “Speaking of Rhûnish nobles, when we were by the timber merchants and plaster artisans, we heard some mansions have burned down, as recently as the past week. No one knows what caused them or the identities of the instigators, but all of the owners of all of these estates were said to have been heavily in debt. The merchants no longer fill their orders. No guarantee of payment.”

Celdir asked, his voice meek and tentative, “Do you think she is…” The unspoken word hung leaden in the air. None dared to finish his sentence, for doing so would be to speak it into existence.

“No,” Aeglas cut in, his tone alloyed with steel. “She is alive. She has to be.”

The others exchanged hesitant glances and after a moment of what felt like an eternity, nodded.

“Do you think we should contact any local informants?” Celdir asked, trying to steer the conversation away from the minefield he had created by accident. “Could provide some useful information. They are more familiar with the local area.”

“Only if you want to give away our position,” The Sinda replied. “Our dear envoy was placed under house arrest under uncertain circumstances. We do not know whether she was betrayed by her debt-entrapped Rhûnish hosts or by someone who was supposed to be friendly.”

Tirloth nodded. “Given the present circumstances, we have to assume everyone we meet, even His Majesty’s spies and informants, are hostile.”

She paused, assessing. “These entities have already captured at least one elf, up to three if you count her guards. If they are alerted to our presence, rescue will certainly be impossible.”

A hush fell over the room as each realized the tenuous position of their mission. They were alone in this rotting land with no one to rely on. No banners to come to their aid should they fail, just the creeping knowledge that one careless mistake, one gesture too ostentatious, one phrase inflected too boldly would see them suffer the same fate as their quarry. The lamps flickered, and their shadows lengthened along the pitted walls.

Aeglas sighed. “To conclude, we have rumors from drunk workers and merchants that a caravan carrying unknown goods, possibly a work of art, departed in haste eight or nine days ago through the eastern gates before dawn. It bypassed standard bureaucratic protocols as it likely had noble sponsorship. And some Dorwinion mansions of indebted nobles caught on fire recently. ”

The other shifted uneasily. The wooden table groaned in protest.

“It is suggestive,” Saeroth began to offer.

“But it is not enough. We need more. Real evidence. Something we can present to His Majesty and not face the threat of exile for incompetence.”

The dark-haired ellon gestured in exasperation, his palms open. “Well, that is everything we have so far. Whether it pleases you or not.” He grumbled, “Trust my luck, to be assigned to a hare-brained chase in Rhûn.”

Celdir ventured, “We have only searched for a day. Perhaps tomorrow will bring more clues.”

“Let us hope so,” their leader was already preparing his bedroll for the night.

“The Valar will guide us,” the red-haired scout vowed, a promise to himself.

Tirloth raised her eyes to peer past the murky window at the night sky. Above, set against swaths of indigo, foreign stars, perhaps not of Elbereth’s make, glittered.

***

The next morning, just as grey dawn turned to gold, they set out again, hoping for a more favorable gamble against fortune.

“Another day, another coin. And that’s why I woo maids on His Majesty’s…” Saeroth paused, searching for a rhyme. “…designs.”

The elleth wrinkled her nose. Celdir whooped before catching himself. “That did not even rhyme! Good thing you are not a bard, for you would starve.”

Saeroth bowed with a mock flourish. “This humble minstrel, at your service.”

The younger ellon crowed, “I heard before the woods turned dark and there was more travel to our kin in Lórien, we would have joint feasts. If those Lórien elves heard your verses, Saeroth, they would have turned green!”

Saeroth smirked in response.

“Were you all there at that Late Summer’s feast that one year, about a century ago, when Lady Tatharel sang that lay?” Tirloth asked.

Saeroth replied, “Yes, it was the only time she presented verses publicly. What was it again?” He tilted his head in contemplation, willing the memory to surface.

“Something sad, from the First Age, about a moth and a flame,” the elleth supplied.

“Yes, it was so stirring that by the end, half the court was in tears. Even that sly fox Lord Faeron looked vaguely remorseful,” Aeglas added.

“Ah—it was a lay based on the Athrabeth Andreth ah Finrod!” Saeroth finally recalled.

The other three Silvan elves stared at him.

The Sinda quickly explained, “The Dialogue of Andreth, an Edain wise woman, and Finrod, an elf lord from the West. Andreth loved his brother, Aegnor, and he, her. But because of war and that her mortal soul after death would leave the Circles of the World, he could not wed her.”

Celdir squinted. “Why was everything so complicated? If they loved each other, why not be together, for whatever time they had?”

“You are not the first. Andreth asked Lord Finrod the same question.”

“And what did he say?”

“Something about Aegnor loving her would be pitying and diminishing her love.”

“Seems like an awful lot of excuses.”

Saeroth did not answer at first. These were just tales he had heard from his tutor. Of golden princes and fair maidens, too far removed from his reality.

“So why did she sing of that?”

“Maybe, because she, like Andreth, loved a golden lord who loved her back. But whom she could not have,” Tirloth added.

“Or, maybe it was a nice poetic exercise,” Saeroth shot back, but even to his ears, his words sounded thin.

“A month after His Majesty’s engagement was announced?” The elleth arched a brow. “That is an awful lot of coincidences.”

He rolled his eyes. Tirloth continued, “No, if you consider it, if what you say is true, it would fit. I just did not realize it at the time. Just as Andreth and Aegnor are sundered because of the fates of their souls, she and His Majesty are forever separated as he binds his fëa to another.”

“If what the laws and customs of the West are true,” Saeroth refuted. But even he recognized it was a weak rebuttal, and he grudgingly had to concede the plausibility of her claims.

“And this is going to help us find her, how?” Aeglas asked.

“I thought by understanding her better, even if indirectly, we would have a better sense of her motives and possible actions,” the elleth replied.

Their leader nodded. Then, his eyes focused on the looming crossroads.

“We will part ways up ahead. Tirloth and I will try the administrative section of the merchant quarters today to understand standard bureaucratic protocol for departing caravans and any other associated anomalies. Saeroth and Celdir, you try the labor square to see what business you can elicit.”

The scouts nodded and approached the intersection. As they turned to part,

“Wait. Do you see that?” Tirloth’s voice ran through the soft golden dawn.

“Where?”

“There, in the alleyway. I think I see…” Her gaze focused, and her eyes widened in recognition.

“Greenwood motif. Half-visible beneath the piles of bodies.”

The other elves whipped their heads towards the alleyway. The corridor was like any other, shaded, filled with the moans and broken prayers of the indigent and dying. A tangle of limbs and torsos, some wrapped, some with open wounds, even pale bones gleaming in the low light.

But unmistakably, undeniably, they could make out the motif of Greenwood, a wreath of green leaves gleaming under the scant sunlight. It was woven into the fabric, nearly imperceptible to mortal eyes, but discernible to elven ones under sunlight. Part of state dress for diplomatic guards, meant to be worn with either ceremonial or light traveling armor.

They forced themselves not to run and briskly walked over to the alleyway, stepping over appendages and avoiding the haunted gazes of the half-dead. With much effort, they found the pair of bloodied ankles wearing the torn trousers. Shoving pale, swollen, and far too rigid limbs aside, as Aeglas and Celdir took the ankles in their hands, they were careful to avoid the linear welts of opened flesh—whip marks, Aeglas noted. The other two scouts positioned themselves at the torso, their bodies bent into a squat as they slid their hands under the torso.

“On my count,” Aeglas said.

“One,”

“Two,”

“Three! Pull!”

With a great heave, the body tumbled from the corpse pile, and despite their elven dexterity, the scouts took a few steps to balance themselves and their load before settling the figure gently on the ground.

Saeroth leaned in. Then froze.

“By an orc’s mangled teeth,” he breathed.

Aeglas locked his jaw. He had seen mutilation. He had seen death. He had watched his friends gurgle on their blood as they died on the ashen plains of Dagorlad. He had held their hands as they choked out regrets, prayers, and worries for their families, as their words slurred into bubbles and forced through rigid lips.

But nothing in a millennium of service could have prepared him for this.

Before them lay the crumpled shape of what had once been an elf. Dark bruises bloomed across every visible skin surface, some dark and fresh, others fading into mottled green and yellow. On top of this horrid canvas rested strokes, edged in gradients of crusted blood. Some jagged with macerated edges, others clean, the work of thoughtful blades.

What was once handsome features was now marred, like pieces of shattered porcelain rejoined by clumsy hands—facial fractures, a thought flickered through Tirloth’s mind.

Part of his chest moved against the rest: out on inhale, in on exhale, the sign of multiple broken ribs.

Celdir had gone fully pale. He stood by the torso, his eyes dead fixed on the figure, but he made no motion to move. It was as if his feet were welded to the ground. His hands slack, his expression gaunt. For a moment, he appeared like the undead ghosts of the alleyway.

Saeroth placed a finger on the body’s neck, then under the nose.

“His heart still beats, and he breathes. Barely.”

Aeglas nodded. “This is likely one of her two guards. Let us see—”

“It is Thaladir,” Tirloth cut in. The others looked at her. Her eyes were soft with pity. “He asked me for a dance once.”

“Well, he will not be dancing any time soon, that much is certain,” Saeroth muttered. He looked up at Aeglas.

“Here is your real evidence, Captain.”

***

Although it was high summer in Greenwood, the council chamber felt exceptionally cold. The heavy, humid air seemed to enter the lungs, crystallize, and settle deep into the body.

As opposed to the emergency council meeting called a little over a week prior, this gathering was larger. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of stone latticework inlaid with luminescent fungi and gems, upon a raised dais hewn from bedrock, the king sat upon a seat of pale beech.

Unlike his throne, crowned with sprawling antlers, the High Seat was carved in the image of twin trees with interwoven branches. The crest of his house, elk antlers entwined with leaves, was carved into the back of his seat. A garland of oak leaves and elderflowers set upon a frame of willow branches (tathar, her namesake, his mind offered, unbidden) rested on his brows. He wore robes of deep green hemmed with golden embroidery of vines and berries like the dappled sunlight shining through the forest eaves. His pale hair caught the glimmer of the light.

He was the image of grace and serenity, if it were not for the tension that strained in his silver-blue eyes.

To his right sat his queen, Ithildis, on a seat of slender silverwood and river pearls. Braided into her hair of red-brown, portending of the autumn to come, were trailing honeysuckles and wood sorrel. She, like her husband, donned brocades of green, although of a lighter shade, the same hue as the forest clearings on a bright and fair day. Despite the incident that had occurred in the western wing five days prior, she wore a carefully arranged expression of queenly clemency and gentleness.

A dozen paces away from the monarchs, the great lords of Thranduil’s court had their seats of alder and ash. Arranged in a semicircle, the seats each bore the crest of its bearer: arrows, flames, and stars. At the edge of the arc was a seat carved with a willow branch and draped in sapphire silk, the color of her father’s house. Although she had departed court a hundred years past, when a foolish courtier had suggested removing the seat, a single piercing stare from Thranduil severed the notion. Yet, her seat was moved from the center, the position closest to him, to the periphery. It now stood as a ghost, lingering, watchful, waiting for its owner, who may never return.

Beyond them were benches of dark polished wood and lined with velvet for the minor envoys, captains of modest rank, and healers’ delegates. And further out, quiet and unobtrusive, near the back wall of the chamber, were stone benches with long tables for scribes, quartermasters, auditors, and pages who recorded council proceedings and scratched figures and corrections with styli wielded by deft hands.

Thranduil stared at the space in front of him, between his seat and the arc of lords, where she had stood and offered speeches, corrections, refutations, and exhortations in service of the realm. Where she had paced, where she had gestured, where she had been at times blazing fire and at times cold steel, in tireless dedication for a realm that she had helped to build, in devotion for a king who could not return the same.

A raft elf, a guest invited by Lord Faeron, who now oversaw trade after her departure, had just concluded his speech on the state of the wine trade.

“Your Majesty, and my lords,” the elf said, the soft tings of his Silvan accent echoing in the vaulted chamber, “While one can always expect some fluctuations in trade, we have never seen the anomalies associated with the wine coming to Esgaroth, particularly the Dorwinion variety. The bargemen arrive pale, fearful, and afraid to speak too much. They are quick to unload the barrels, demand increasing amounts of gold in payment, and then set off quickly.”

The other lords murmured among themselves. One leaned forward, “How much gold are they demanding?”

The raft elf shrugged. “Depends. Some on the contracted rates. Others perhaps a tenthfold more.” When he saw the councilors’ frowns, he added, “We pay them. Otherwise, they will not unload the barrels.”

Thranduil inclined his head. He had already known this from the scouts’ message a week prior: the delays in wine shipment and the increased regulations for moving goods. At the time, he had reckoned it an expected variation within the cyclical nature of trade. But now that a raft elf, one who saw countless seasons of the river trade, felt the circumstances were odd enough to travel to court, the matter could not be ignored.

A chilling thought took root in his heart: was this another oversight that would doom her? One step too late, his mind whispered, you were always one step too late.

Although none spoke, everyone in the room, from Thranduil to the proud lords to the greenest scribe, knew that she kept the Dorwinion wine flowing. And now, not even a fortnight after her final missive, the wine trade was destabilizing. Poor timing as well, for autumn and Mereth-nuin-Giliath was to occur in under two months. Dorwinion wine was always served at the feast.

Someone let out a long exhale. All knew that although her personal…situation with His Majesty was perhaps regrettable or advantageous, depending on whom one asked, from a strategic perspective, her presence was always convenient. Fewer troubles, fewer headaches.

One of the lords ventured gently, “And what news from Rhûn? What say their lords on Her Ladyship’s situation?”

Thranduil did not speak, but his eyes darkened with a storm gathering sky-fire and thunder. The faint scratch of styli in the back chamber stopped.

Galion stepped forward and unfurled a scroll faintly redolent of cardamom and rose. His voice rang out, steady, “From the undersigned Lords of the Confederacy of Rhûn and the Special Autonomous Region of Dorwinion, at this time, we regret to inform Your Majesty and his council that we do not have an update on the whereabouts of Lady Tatharel Sûlthiriel. Her last known station was at Sharesh-Kal, Court of the Wine-Flower, received by Lord Azrâhil. As you may know, the region is undergoing an economic renaissance, and with Lady Tatharel’s brilliance in such matters, she may be assisting in its development.

“Should we discover any additional information, we will be sure to inform Your Majesty and the Woodland Realm.”

Silence.

Lord Faeron met Thranduil’s frosted gaze and then looked away, already weighing the missive’s words. Although the letter was phrased politely, there was no mistaking that all it offered were empty platitudes. The words were perfumed courtesies, brittle and hollow, and not worth the parchment they were written on.

“They are lying,” someone hissed behind Faeron. He raised an eyebrow and retorted,

“So? If we accuse them of lying, what do you think they will do? What will it change? Do you want the wine to entirely stop flowing?”

He sighed. Although he would not exactly call Tatharel a friend, he at least had to respect her political shrewdness. They had known each other since their childhood in Doriath, he some decades younger than she. And if this boar-headed approach was how they responded to the Rhûnish lords’ missive, she would rather remain lost in Rhûn.

Across the chamber, Captain Calenhîr, the Sindarin captain who had recommended the initial scouting party, said, “Your Majesty, we still have a reserve of scouts to send eastward. Would you like me to recommend a second party of scouts—”

“Captain Calenhîr,” the Silvan Lord Thorondir cut in, “Are you aware of how many deaths from the borders there were this month?”

“Four,” the captain replied tightly.

“And that is four too many,” the lord concluded. He turned to Thranduil, “Your Majesty, we have already sent a scouting party that could otherwise be deployed to our borders. The woods grow dark. Foul things stir in the branches, not even three miles from the palace. We must think of the realm and preserve what we have.”

Thranduil’s eyes flashed. “Lord Thorondir, you presume much.” His voice was soft.

After the last meeting, where Lord Sîrdhon, too young, too eager, had openly accused Tatharel of treachery and was met with the king’s fury, everyone avoided repeating the same mistake. Yet Thorondir’s words lingered, and the implication that Tatharel was a liability, even if unwillingly, hung in the air.

The lord merely bowed and said, “I serve Your Majesty and the realm.”

The council chamber once again sank into silence.

Thranduil knew some had written off her fate and were choosing what they would wear to her funeral, body present or not. Others wanted to help, either out of pity for her or themselves, when they reached Valinor and would face the judgement of her kin. Anyone past their first century could see Lord Thorondir was veiling inaction behind resource scarcity. Yet, he was not wrong. With the pestilence spreading in the woods, every able-bodied warrior or scout counted.

Thranduil did not speak. His face was shadowed and appeared carved from marble. The elderflowers in his crown cast flickering shadows onto his pale hair.

The court was at an impasse. Even the air did not move.

Then, for the first time that day, Ithildis spoke, gentle, her voice brimming with compassion, “Your Majesty, my lords” she nodded at Thranduil and then at the seated lords, “Let us draft an open appeal, co-signed by Dale, requesting proof of Lady Tatharel’s well-being. Arbitration by neutral parties may pressure Rhûn without blades.”

The words rolled off her tongue as foreign. They were dignified, yes, but they felt performative, as if she were an actress reciting lines from a script. After that…unfortunate encounter with His Majesty (her husband) a few nights past, she knew she would not solidify her position in court through his affection.

Despite being the Chief of the Nandor, a title she inherited from her mother, she was unfamiliar with the intricacies of Sindarin court games. She knew what the other lords whispered, even the Silvan ones that had initially pushed for her queenship. That she did not measure up to her, that she was still braiding wildflowers when she was holding together the supply lines or rebuilding the realm’s economy after the war, while barely able to walk.

Ithildis squared her shoulders and set her jaw. It was time for her to prove her competence as queen beyond a symbolic figure of Silvan–Sindarin unity.

Thranduil sent her a glance, perhaps of surprise, perhaps of something else.

The lords hesitated and then, with the gentleness of a parent chiding an ignorant child, began,

“Open letters travel slowly. She may be lost before the letter reaches Dale.”

“Dale will not jeopardize its spice contracts.”

Lord Faeron added, “Excellent thought, Your Majesty, but arbitration with a neutral party is merely a gesture, not leverage. It requires all parties to act on good faith, which, from the Rhûnish lords’ letter, there appears to be very little.”

Thranduil said nothing.

Ithildis flushed red. The heat of humiliation prickled at her collar, and her necklace of gold and chrysoberyl seared. Her throat felt tight as the bitterness and shame closed around her. Here she was, trying to play their court games, trying to belong, trying to be queen, and all she received were the patronizing remarks of lords who spoke to her like she was an ignorant elfling.

Her hands curled into fists beneath her sleeves. Her nails bit into flesh.

She took a deep breath and forced a smile, her jaw tight.

“Lady Tatharel is smart. Experienced. Brilliant,” she forced the words out. “She understood the risks, as we have previously discussed.”

Thranduil’s eyes stilled, distant, as if he were seeing someone else, who was younger, quicker, brighter. Ithildis had seen that look before. What the memory was, she did not need to know. All she knew was that it belonged not to her. And that was enough.

Before Ithildis could stop herself, jealousy, rage, and all the injustice of the past hundred years tumbled out.

“Yes, she knew the risks. She took them. She disappeared.” A pause, dripping with venom and the frustration over her impotence, her incompetence. “She was always good at disappearing. She has disappeared once from this court already.”

If the chamber was cold before, it was now freezing. Not even a mote of dust dared to float. This was far worse than Sîrdhon’s words.

Even Faeron, quick with his words and sly with his wit, stared at the ground.

Ithildis finished, her cheeks now deep with blush. She found Thranduil looking at her, his eyes molten with fury and disappointment. The aristocratic line of his mouth was set firm and low, drawn into a near half-snarl. The king was still, but his muscles tensed, coiled, like a predator about to pounce on its prey.

Thranduil rose half-way, a hand outstretched towards her, the palladium ring on his finger caught the light like a blade. “Retract your words, and this ends here.”

Although she was trembling, she met his gaze. She was his queen, Queen of the Woodland Realm. After a hundred years of hoping that His Majesty would look at her as such, she was tired of waiting, of pretending not to see her husband looking at a half-ghost who was forever sundered from him by the First Music.

She lifted her jaw. “No.”

A ripple of gasps spread through the council chambers. Open defiance of the King. Unthinkable.

In the back, some scribes had dropped their styluses. The auditors had set aside their parchments. The quartermasters looked up from their ledgers, their gaze sharp.

It was from this corner of the chamber that a voice drifted, easy and languid.

“Who here remembers the Greenwood Model?”

Heads turned to see Lord Silor, Warden of the Northern Eaves, sitting on the stone benches. As if oblivious to the queen’s outburst, he wore a relaxed smile. He was stationed in the north when the emergency meeting was called, but hearing of Tatharel’s disappearance, he returned to the palace at once.

“After two-thirds of our army perished, first at Dagorlad, then at Barad-dûr, she rewrote the provisioning chains that kept us alive in a wasteland when crops failed and our gold ran thin. She calculated the optimal routes for smuggling supplies and letters from dying warriors behind miles of enemy lines.”

Some stirred, remembering the dog-eared and bloodstained letters from their dying kin on the battlefields, marred pieces of parchment, yes, but they still made their way back to Greenwood.

The lord continued, “The Greenwood Model, with its tiered foraging zones, rotating supply caches, and shadow-route relays, was hers. It saved thousands, and it was incorporated into standard logistical texts in the Third Age, in Lindon, Imladris, even Gondor.”

The others around him, the scribes, the auditors, the quartermasters, those elves in quiet, thankless positions who tended to the lifeblood of the realm, murmured in agreement.

Silor leaned back, his easy smile never disappearing from his face. “I was no lord by birth, just the son of glassworkers in Lindon, fated to toil beside kilns, heating sand and blowing glass. But she saw something in me, and she taught me to see, to think. Who else here apprenticed under her?”

Slowly, hands rose. The quartermaster overseeing southern grain imports. The scribe of the royal archives. The auditor involved in Dale wool tariffs. The healer in charge of herb supplies and requisitioning. The vaulted chamber echoed with whispers of her teachings and exercises, including one that pertained to maggoty bread and maintaining psychological morale in the face of scarcity.

The lords in the inner circle froze. They had thought that she, who followed His Majesty and his father east all those years ago, stood alone in court, without family, without kin. That despite her political shrewdness or economic intuition, she at the end of the day only had herself. Yet they neglected to glance over their shoulders to gaze beyond their seats of ash and alder to see the corps of elves who had studied under her tutelage. They were bureaucrats, functionaries, quiet individuals meant to exist between the ledger lines and the drudgeries of state and trade. These elves held no lofty titles, but their labor kept the kingdom’s heart pumping, its vitality flowing. Here was her faction, silent, yet their presence was weighted, bound to her not by any cult of personality, but by dedication to the structures she built alongside them.

Although cold rage still blazed in his eyes, searing white-hot, the edges of Thranduil’s gaze softened just a fraction. Even in her absence, she left him a corps of elves, practical, grounded individuals who would ensure his realm’s prosperity even if she no longer graced his court. That quartermaster of the southern grain imports? Son of a family who ran the local apiary. Or the scribe of the royal archives? Daughter of raft elves who was unsatisfied with a life of ferrying barrels on the Forest River.

She had once told him, when the war was still fresh and the crown rested foreign and heavy on his brows, that she was running no charity. Given the devastation to their armies and the low rate of births, as was the nature of their people, the realm needed every talent available. And when the other lords protested the decision, she spoke, her green eyes gleaming, “If every elf needs to have a forefather who slayed a Balrog to work for the realm, we will find no one left.”

She thought for a moment, and then added, “How many geniuses toiled away in the fields or on the river currents, their talents buried by river mud or orchard soil? In any case, it is no concern of the council who I choose to teach on my own time. Whether they are fit for service will depend on their abilities.”

Lord Silor’s words drew Thranduil from his thoughts. The lord then stepped forward, past the wooden benches, past the arc of the Inner Council, directly into the space where his tutor had once spoken.

He bowed and then looked Ithildis in the eyes.

“Your Majesty, when you speak of her disappearance with such finality, you diminish her. You diminish us, whom she raised in service of the realm. You diminish the structures and institutions she has left behind.”

Ithildis began to speak, “I meant—”

With gentle kindness, Silor interrupted her, “Even though she may not be at court, even though she may be lost, the infrastructure, the lives she has touched,” he gestured at all of court, “have not disappeared.”

He smiled, soft like the dawn sun, “Perhaps Your Majesty would like to visit us in the archives or trade bureaus. We would certainly be delighted to receive you.”

Ithildis’s lips twitched, but she made no sound. The boldness, the polite disrespect, the challenge, the insinuation that she was lesser.

One of the Silvan lords, a relative of Ithildis through her mother, rose. “Silor, how dare you speak to Her Majesty in that manner?”

Silor spared a glance at the lord, and without his smile faltering, he said, “The invitation stands. Any time, Your Majesty.”

He bowed again, turned around, and returned to his seat among his fellow functionaries and peers.

“Enough,” Thranduil’s voice cut through the chamber.

Everyone stilled.

He fixed his gaze of molten mercury, scorching and toxic, on Ithildis.

“You speak of her disappearance. You speak of her as if you knew her. That she was intelligent. That she knew the risks.”

No one dared to breathe.

Ithildis laughed, bitter. “And you knew her well. Or perhaps not well enough, seeing that she has left you twice now.”

Thranduil gripped the armrest of his seat. It groaned, threatening to crumble. The rage in his eyes burned brighter, hotter, like the moment before a star died.

“Since you believe you know her so well,” he began, his voice tight, ragged, and low, “you should also suffer her experiences.”

Tears gathered in her eyes, threatening to spill. With gritted teeth, Ithildis forced them back. Her eyes burned, her cheeks were aflame, she was far from the image of a serene sovereign. She gazed at him, defiant, “What difference does it make? You have always looked at me and seen her.” Her words lashed forward like a whip, tearing apart the space between them.

For a brief moment, Thranduil’s hand moved towards the hilt of his sword. He stopped. The wild fury seemed to collapse inward, calcifying, fossilizing into something cold, something aloof, something even beautiful.

“Your Majesty,” Galion whispered, half in warning of the political ramifications, half out of sympathy for his lord’s impossible position.

He paused for a fraction of a moment and ignored his steward.

He stared at Ithildis. At the flush in her cheeks, the cruelty in her voice. He had endured the court’s silence, its veiled politeness, its sabotage poised as bureaucratic inaction. But this, this was her doom. Ithildis by conventional measures had won: she had the queenship, she had the crown, she had the respect and dignity owed to her station. And for her to stoop down, to strike with barbed words an envoy (his Tatharel) who bled for the realm and who was now half-buried beneath grapevines and foreign intrigue, yes, this was too much, too cruel.

The words house arrest dragged through his mind like rust on a festering wound, like the chains that bound Tatharel in captivity.

May you taste the palest imitation of her pain, he thought.

“Lady Tatharel endured house arrest in Dorwinion for this kingdom, and now so will you.” His voice rose. “The Queen will be confined to her wing until the scouting party returns. No correspondence, no council, no outings. Food and water will be served three times a day, which is more than what can be said for her.”

The ceremonial guards donning polished bronze approached Ithildis. They bowed before her. She cast a final bitter look at her supposed husband. “Fine. So this is how it will be.” She was led away, her back straight, her eyes blazing.

The Silvan lords were in uproar.

“Your Majesty, this is outrageous! To imprison your queen like this.”

“This is a slight against the Silvan tribes. She is the Chief of the Nandor. She shall not be treated in this manner!”

“Silence!” Thranduil’s voice thundered. “You speak of her as the Chief of the Nandor? But what of Tatharel, daughter of Sûlthir, High Councilor of Doriath, and of the House of Elmo? Do you think she ought to be treated as such by this court? Do not think that I do not see the slander and insult this court hurls at her, who cannot even be present to defend herself.”

He rose and started for the chamber doors. As he swept past the lords, advisors, captains, and bureaucrats, his voice rang throughout the vaulted chamber,

“If anyone has quarrel with the queen’s plight, they will find themselves sharing her confinement. We can all use a moment of quiet.”

The silence stretched.

Finally, Faeron leaned back in his seat.

“What a mess…” he muttered.

The Silvan lords gathered around Lord Thorondir and exchanged furious whispers.

“He forgets it was we who crowned his father. On whose backs this realm rests. The Sindar are too proud.”

“Yes, he overreached. But she overstepped. She was the first to cast insult.”

“But such an escalation over an envoy?”

“No, not an envoy. But for her? He would face the Dark Lord for her.”

“We will not forget this affront. But also to the one who made our grain lords what they are. There is no easy answer to that.”

In the back, among the scribes gathering their parchment and auditors arranging their ledgers, Silor met Faeron’s gaze. Silor tilted his head, his eyes with an unnerving, unreadable expression that reminded Faeron of the younger elf’s tutor. A chill spread through the older lord. He knew that look too well. That gaze, it was hers, through another’s eyes. Those piercing green eyes that saw too much.

After a moment, Silor turned and left the chamber.

Faeron looked at the creased hem of his robes.

“What a mess.”

The sapphire silk of her seat rippled, as if agreeing.

That evening, he returned to the council chamber.

Daylight’s spectacle had long since bled away. His seat of twin beech still stood, proud and now alone, on the raised dais. The lesser seat of silverwood and pearl was now absent, likely stowed away in a side chamber by a dutiful steward. The arc of the lords’ chairs and the rows of wooden and stone benches stood unchanged, as mute witnesses to the falsities, the treachery, and the love he could not speak.

He was dressed simply. No crown, no brocades. Only a light tunic and dark trousers. His pale hair, unadorned, caught the ceiling’s dim light. In the deep night, he had slipped in, without Galion or any of the guards, and bolted the doors behind him. This was no King of the Woodland Realm visiting his grand council chamber, just an ellon, stripped of artifice and the oppressive weight of titles.

Only to gain some clarity, he told himself.

In the heavy, humid air of summer, between the sacred heartbeats of stillness, he gazed not at the High Seat, but at that sapphire-draped chair at the periphery. Partly shadowed, it seemed still, yet the shifting light across the folds almost suffused the fabric with an illusion of movement, suspended between half-life and half-death.

And he, donned in light and dark, a supplicant. Perhaps even a sinner.

From the back, he carried a light chair of rowan, a functional piece meant for swift transport. He placed it in front of her seat and sat, facing the silk as if she were still there, with a quill in one hand and an amused glance in her eyes.

The silk did not speak.

He knew what he had done when he ordered Ithildis’s house arrest. The Silvan tribes cried outrage. His marriage collapsed into frost. Yes, those were consequences he would have to bear. The intrigues within his court and the external threats of a darkening forest would all demand an answer.

Yet he could not sit idly, for not even the Queen could slander her. His rage, first wild and thunderous, then cold and crushing, had overtaken him. He did not deny it.

The corners of his mouth lifted to a bitter smile. If she had been here in court, seated in her place when those spiteful words were uttered, she would have mastered it. He saw it clearly: how she would have turned each word, as careful as a court lady selecting her finery, and let insults slide from her like water from an otter’s pelt. How she would have carefully, politely, unraveled Ithildis’s words until the Silvan elf knew not where anger ended and humiliation began.

Her composure, refined through ages of endings and wars, would never have shattered. She would never have lashed out in impotent rage. Tatharel would have jested, soothed, and threatened until all left believing they had won, or at least, not lost.

“You always were the better side of me,” he whispered, so softly that his words vanished into the folds of the silk.

Indeed, she always had a strategic mind. Without her, he was raw, impulsive. A balance within him tilted, as though loaded with false coins.

He raised his hand to his chest, partly to quiet the ache, partly to touch her final letter, still tucked close to him. The letter, in which, for the first time since his engagement, she had called him by name. Even as she drowned in a hopeless land, she wrote in their silver cipher with that same unshaken clarity.

Greenwood’s secrets have not been compromised.

If you do not hear from me, I ask as a favor to send word with our people sailing West to inform Celeborn of Lórien and my father Sûlthir in Alqualondë of my plight. I do not ask you or Celeborn to raise your banners in arms.

I hope we meet again beneath different skies.

Without pretense, she told him to cut his losses. Not to raise his banners in war. Only to send word west. She knew that the realm could not afford a war. Not for her. She was no queen. Merely an envoy snared by misfortune.

His breathing roughened.

She had always seen herself as expendable. A piece on the board meant to be sacrificed, whether it was for the crown or for peace. What had Faeron said? The bishop moved in unconventional ways, but was ultimately bound to the color of its squares.

Yes. That was her. Always moving askance, clever, oblique, but never free.

He wanted to seize her shoulders, look her in the eyes, and scream that she was never disposable. Not her. Not Tatharel. Never Tatharel.

But it was too late. She was gone. And after that final missive, nothing. Only empty Rhûnish platitudes. No word from the scouts.

The sapphire seat remained indifferent.

“You told me to leave you behind. To forget you.” His voice was tight and low, straining against the yoke of pain and memory and love that could never be.

“But how can I let go of you now?” He gave a short, sardonic laugh. “It is not so easy. Not after five millennia.”

His voice cracked. “When you return, we shall have a grand feast. Poetry. Music. Linguistic competitions.” Fondness entered his tone. “Although you or your students always won. No one east of the Anduin could match you in Common Eldarin syntax.”

Like the shipwrecked grasping for a hemp line, he said with flimsy hope, “And we will have lemon tarts. Do you remember the lemons? The ones you brought from Lindon. Some still grow in the grove near the southern walls. My father told you they would not survive the march north, but you insisted.”

The sweetness of the memory lingered for a few moments. Then, the wind fled the sails. The light in Thranduil’s eyes dimmed. He had thought the rage and grief would hurt the most. But no, it was the light, the remembering, the possibilities that cut the deepest. Gentle water weathered even the most unyielding stones.

“Come back. Return to Greenwood.” His voice fell to a whisper.

Return to me.

A prayer by a supplicant.

He reached towards the sapphire silk. It was still, waiting for his touch that had once brushed her dark locks, once traced the stars on her brows.

When he was a thread’s width from the fabric, shame—cold shame flooded through him. Corrosive, it lanced through him. Every nerve. Every vein. His hand froze. He had no right, not after what he had done. Not when he wed another. Not for love. For duty.

Five days ago, he could stand in her chambers and still believe that the silence would end. That the scouts would return. That she would be among them. That belief had granted him the insolent freedom to reminisce, to pretend that a future awaited them. But not now. Not after the silence. Not after polite non-words from Rhûn. Not after the slander cast in open court.

That belief was fraying.

As if burned, Thranduil withdrew his hand. His breath quickened. The dim room now seemed too bright. He stood. He dragged his chair towards the wall, the rowan scraping against the floor.

Then, like the guilty who had confessed too much, with quick, irregular steps, he turned and fled.

Her seat remained untouched. The deep blue of the silk was watchful, waiting. An altar. A confessional.

Yet, what divinity listens to words falling upon unhearing ears?

***

The Dorwinion pub simmered with the summer’s heat. Greasy tables, even greasier food. The calls of the street hawkers for fried beans and lamb skewers drifted into the dusky tavern. Saeroth grumbled and drew his traveling cloak tighter. He adjusted his headscarf of faded indigo and leaned forward to prod at his mug of watered-down ale. His fingers curled around the handle, but then withdrew.

The last two days had been fruitless. Even after they found Thaladir the morning before, the battered guard slept through the entire day. And when he did stir that evening, he screamed loud enough to wake half the inn until the scouts stuffed a rag in his mouth.

Saeroth’s thoughts drifted to the evening before. How eagerly they had gathered around Thaladir, eyes bright with anticipation.

Tirloth grasped the elf by the shoulders, met his eyes, and said, “Thaladir, mín. Daugyr lín o Eryn Galen. Le varn na sîdh.” Thaladir, it is us. Scouts from Greenwood. You are safe now. 

At the sound of her voice, Thaladir had finally stilled. Recognition flickered behind his eyes. His shoulders sagged, whether with relief or shame, no one could say. He tried to sit up before wincing.

Aeglas laid a warning hand over the elf’s arm, a rare patch of uninjured skin.

“Stay still. Your injuries are grave. We dressed your wounds with forest herbs and song, but do not be hasty.”

Thaladir only closed his eyes in surrender. His voice, hoarse and wispy, drifted past cracked lips.

“It is over.”

Saeroth narrowed his eyes.

“What do you mean? What is over?”

Thaladir gave no answer.

“What do you remember?” Saeroth pressed.

“They…they took her from us.”

“Who?”

Thaladir’s eyelids fluttered. “All of them. Rhûn. Lord Azrâhil. The eastern delegations.”

“When?”

“I do not know. There was no day or night there. Just…it has been a while.”

“Weeks? A month?” Saeroth urged. Aeglas gave him a sharp look. He backed off.

“Where is the other guard, Orthelian?”

“We were also separated…something about also having another male. I cannot remember,” Thaladir whispered.

“Where did they take her?”

“I do not know.” He groaned. “We were separated.”

Saeroth looked at the other scouts. Frustration showed in every line of their faces. The crease between Aeglas’s brows, the tightness near Tirloth’s eyes, the twitch of Celdir’s fingers. They had travelled all this way, piecing together scattered clues, and when they thought they had something solid in Thaladir, it felt as if the Valar had dashed their hopes to the floor and ground them underfoot.

“What did they do to you?”

Thaladir’s eyes dimmed. Silent, he bared his arm, riddled with wounds.

Saeroth took a deep breath. This was going nowhere.

“Last question. Anything else?”

A long silence. Thaladir stilled, as if digging beneath all the layers of pain and horror. At last, he murmured,

“Before they cast me in the alley, one of them said ‘Likha yume’et, na lannish jindûl san.’”

Saeroth opened his mouth to press again, but Aeglas cut him off.

“Enough, Saeroth. He has told us all he can. Let him rest.”

Aeglas, Tirloth, and Celdir all turned to Saeroth expectantly as he was the most familiar with Rhûnish dialects.

He turned Thaladir’s words over in his mind. Again. And again. And again. He had picked up some rudimentary Rhûnish with his raft-elf kin, but he was no expert, and certainly not with its tangle of dialects. Outside of the Envoy herself, few needed to learn it. And these words? Utterly foreign.

He spoke slowly, “It…sounds like Rhûnish. If you tilt your head and squint hard enough.” He paused. “But there is something else mixed in. Something…off. I cannot tell what.”

The others deflated. Tirloth shook her head and returned to Thaladir’s side. Aeglas sighed and ran a hand over his face. Celdir paced like a caged beast.

“You are welcome,” he muttered.

They exchanged a few more words about the day’s dead ends and retired for the night with prickling unease and fatigue.

The memory dissolved. The pungent scent of pickled chicken feet drew Saeroth out of his reverie.

Likha yume’et, na lannish jindûl san.

He mouthed the words again, parsing every base note, body, and overtone. A humorless smile crept across his face.

Of course, she would leave behind a linguistic conundrum. He had attended a public symposium where she had eviscerated some poor scholar’s theory of Eldarin. Or was it Telerin? Whatever.

For the past day, those words rattled like colorful marbles in his pocket, syllables he kept rolling over, again and again.

Likha… The first part was completely unknown to him, a sound that was absent in the Rhûnish he knew. But the next sound, kha, felt clipped, as if someone had opened a window and forgotten to close it. There might have been a final sound…khat, khaf, khad. Edict, tax, and…gift? He shuddered at the final word. He had seen the bidding squares in the markets, where flesh could be valued in gold.

And yume’et. Again, there was a pause between the syllables, a breath that obscured something. He knew the -’et was likely a descriptive suffix. Or was it possessive? But the middle part, me’, was missing a sound. mezh? meñ? mek? Those would be virtuous, voluptuous, and fine. He scoffed softly. Surely Thaladir’s captors would not be calling him curvaceous!

The next phrase was more difficult. na lannish jindûl san.

Was the first word a preposition? Or an adverb? A conditional? And the last word, a register marker? Or a filler to preserve rhythm? He shook his head. Probably some idiom or construction he would not guess, not even in a hundred years. And not to mention lannish jindûl. Had Thaladir even heard it right?

He took a swig of his ale and grimaced. Stale. Weak. Useless like the clues.

Damn it all. There were too many unknowns. Other than the half-patched caravan story, this was all they had.

A sudden roar of laughter swelled behind him. Fists pounded a table. Mugs sloshed. Chairs scraped. Saeroth withdrew deeper into his cloak.

“Yushar, it has been many seasons since I last saw you. And you speak more lazily with each meeting!”

A flatter, wry voice answered, “Why, it is the Lajek accent. Very refined.”

“You sound like a birthing goat. Who drops their ks and ds?”

A third voice quipped, “Even goatshit is sharper than that.”

The first speaker said, “Hah, bat sa’meka rûn e-s’kha? It’s bat sakmeka rûn e-sikhad, not that shit that came out of your mouth.”

“Whatever. All those ks and ds, you sound like you’ve been sucking too many cocks. Maybe that’s why you can’t get a wife. Don’t swing that way, huh?”

“Why you!” The table burst into laughter again.

Saeroth froze. Sa’meka. Sakmeka. S’kha. Sikhad. Different words, but the same lazy drop, the same clipped syllables, the same elisions. Could the missing sound in likha be likhad? And yume’et—yumek’et? A growing horror gripped him. In that case, it would not be a voluptuous tax, but a fine gift. And it would fit, too well. A caravan departing ten days prior carried a fine artwork. A gift for an emperor beyond the desert.

He started to rise. He needed to tell the others. The tavern’s ruddy barmaid approached him for a tally. He reached for his coin pouch, then paused, and ordered another ale. The maid huffed, rolled her eyes, and stepped away.

Saeroth sank back into his seat. He had been too hasty. A few more minutes might yield more clues. Like what lannish jindûl meant.

The other table still roared, laughter, fists, and mugs striking wood.

“And let me tell you, the whores on the Emerald Coast. Pale, slender things. Soft, obedient. Smell lovely. I would die without complaint in their arms.”

Ulmo, drown me, Saeroth thought to himself.

“Too bad it’s getting harder to get there. Bandits, pirates, and all.”

“Ai, tell me about it. My sweet Rensa is waiting for me.”

“Yes, yes, your big-titted whore,” Yushar replied. His tone turned wistful. “To return to the Emerald Coast again. naisë Zûna Sel’a.”

“What did you say, Yushar? Do you mean nai Zûnakh Selka sa? Your mother would be turning in her grave if she heard you say that. Say that in front of your uncle and he’d whip you twice for speaking her sounds like that.”

“That old bastard? He’s too busy gambling and fucking whores to care. Anyways, I have to tell you about this new deal…” Their voices drifted away.

Crude as they were, their words dug into Saeroth like fishhooks. Gnawing dread settled in his gut. The boisterous noise of the tavern fizzled out for a moment, replaced by silence. Na…san was not two words; it was a construction, nai…sa. Not adverbs. Not conditionals. But a direction. A destination. Towards the Emerald Coast. Towards Lannish Jindûl, wherever that may be.

This was no longer a linguistic exercise.

He stood, threw a few coins on the table, and brushed past the barmaid returning with his ale. She started to protest, then saw the coins, double what he owed. Without a word, she swept them into her apron.

Saeroth strode out of the tavern and headed for the inn. He could already hear Aeglas saying that a phrase was not a clue. That they still did not know what Lannish Jindûl meant. But he had to tell the others. That their suspicion was right. She was not under house arrest in Dorwinion. She had been taken. To Lannish Jindûl.

His feet skimmed over the cobblestones. Smoke and evening air clung to his cloak. The smell of cumin, rosemary, and chili, all masking the sweet scent of meat, curdled in his stomach.

Although he wanted to deny it, deep down, he knew that they were already behind.

The wind rose and blew dust into his eyes. He blinked. The sting of salt and something bitter beneath.

***

She had long lost count of the days spent with her companions, the sunlight and the sea breeze.

The torrid heat stripped her of every last drop of moisture.

The metallic tang of the sea.

The piercing cries of the gulls.

The prickle of the saltbush and tamarisk.

The blisters on her feet had burst, scabbed, and burst again.

The scream of her body had dulled into a quiet throb.

Her fëa whispered as it strained against the tethers that bound her to Ennor. It yearned westwards, past Greenwood, past Mithlond, across Belegaer, all the way to the northern shores of Valinor, where the silent Halls of Mandos loomed.

Quickly now, while you still can, her fëa murmured, a gentle balm, a final solace. While you can still find your way home.

Her gaze clouded with tears, heavy and aching, rising for all the times she held them back.

It would be so easy, so painless, to close her eyes, exhale, and release. To find rest in Námo’s halls, at peace, to be made whole again. Yes, she had tarried for far too long east of the Sea. It had been three Ages and a lifetime of heartbreak.

You have already said your goodbyes. Why linger?

Yes, why should she linger? She was no longer beloved, merely necessary.

An envoy. A functionary. The council would send a replacement when the region stabilized. Fading was more elegant, a final gesture of a diplomat as she dissolved into the sunset.

Come home. Fade.

Despite her trembling breath and leaden lashes, she steeled herself. She imagined her father’s old glaive of unyielding alloyed silver, and she tightened every muscle, from her calves, through her core, up through her chest and neck. Her eyes flared like deep emeralds in the sunlight. Jaws clenched, she forced the tears back.

No, she will not fade. Not like her mother, lying down, closing her eyes, and letting go. No, she will survive. She will fight. Until her final breath.

Because this was the oath Tatharel Sûlthiriel of Doriath swore before the stars that night as Sirion burned: to continue, to survive, to live.

Yet, the pull of her fëa westward remained undeniable. She shut her eyes tight as she summoned the last dredges of will. A resoluteness forged in the endings of worlds, through the flames and ash and war and grief. Reaching deep within herself, she sought that memory dappled in sunlight, an echo of what could have been.

And it came forth, by unseen grace.

It was early into the Second Age, a few centuries after the War of Wrath and the sinking of Beleriand. They had traveled east from Balar to Harlindon, the fiefdom of her daeradar, Lord Celeborn.

Although it was summer, the coastal winds of the Gulf of Lhûn kept the land cool and dry. Rain was rare, but morning fog would drift over the waters. Olive and fig trees studded the hillsides; in the gardens, roses, oleanders, and lavender bloomed.

A warm afternoon, golden and resplendent. Though already a few centuries old, fully grown by the reckoning of her people, they still often called her Celeborn’s kinswoman or Sûlthir’s girl. She sat beneath a lemon tree, revising notes from that morning’s council.

A rustle.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a rosemary sprig sway. She looked up. It was Thranduil, with his hair blazing like sunfire in the afternoon light.

“May I join you?”

She smiled and shifted to make space. “Of course.”

He settled beside her. They were close, nearly touching. The ends of his hair brushed near her parchment. He smelled like pine and seawind, as if fresh from the harbors.

As he leaned to glance at her writings, his breath brushed over her ear. She flicked her quill absently.

“Ah. I see the council was particularly lively today.”

“You have no idea. The scribes even started a betting pool on whether Lord Calrindor would cuff Gaerlas over the ears.”

He laughed, rich and sonorous. The lemon tree flowers swayed overhead in the breeze.

“Did he?”

She glanced up, her green eyes meeting his silver-blue. The afternoon sun behind him crowned his golden hair in divine light. And his eyes…oh, his eyes, the color of sea-spindrift. In that moment, had someone told her he was a Maia, she would have believed them and asked for a painting. Her cheeks flushed, whether from the heat or something else, she could not say.

“I wish.”

“A pity.”

They held each other’s gaze for a long, dramatic moment and then burst into laughter. At the image of two dignified elf lords resolving their disputes like elflings. At the absurdities of court. At the fragile, hard-won peace. At the fact that they could sit here and dream.

When their laughter died down, she gave in and leaned her head against his shoulder. She breathed in the scent of pine and sea salt, the smell of home before it had burned. He hummed and shifted so she was more comfortable.

She held her quill to the light and tried to peer past the iridescent barbs of the feather.

“Are you trying to find your report answers in your quill?”

“Oh, hush. I am trying to think.”

“A fair sight. And a terrible one.”

She tsked and tapped his nose with her quill. “All these years, and this is how you flirt?”

“Do you deny its effectiveness?”

She grumbled something unintelligible into his shoulder.

“What was that?”

“I said you win, you golden-haired terror.”

“Ah, the noble and quick-witted Lady Tatharel, bested in conversation by me, a mere minor lordling?”

She lightly hit his nose again with her quill.

They settled into easy silence, filled only with the scratch of her quill and the rustle of lemon leaves. She worked on her report while he ran his fingers through her dark hair, fashioning the locks into intricate braids.

“Thranduil?”

“Yes?” He paused, midway through twining her hair with lemon flowers.

“How is it that after so much death and desolation, we can still look on beauty?” She gestured at the pale blossoms and ripening lemons.

He did not answer her at first and resumed his braiding. Then, he spoke, “Perhaps it is because of the beauty sung into the Music.”

“You think so?” She sat up to face him. “If the Music is meant to be beautiful, then why so much grief?”

A few moments passed as Thranduil contemplated his response. “Grief and beauty are woven in proportionate parts, as the lemon is tart and sweet.”

She exhaled, a fond smile rising to her lips. He might have been younger than her by a decade or two, but his wisdom rivaled that of elves twice his age.

“It is a shame you do not attend more poetry recitations.” Her eyes caught the afternoon light, green and vibrant as the leaves above. “A great loss to the court. And an even greater loss to the elf-maidens.”

“A shame indeed. Although one elf-maiden is never bereft of my witty remarks.”

She laughed and returned to her parchment. And he, to weaving lemon blossoms in her hair.

Then, the memory faded like liquid gold slipping between her fingers. Her hair, which had once been sleek, lush, and braided with white blooms, was now knotted and dull. The soft gold of afternoon became a harsh, dry heat that prickled her scalp. There were no lemon trees here, only the angular saxauls that extended their branches up to the sky like withered hands.

She savored the memory, the image, him, before war and duty, committing every glimpse, every leaf, every strand of his hair into her soul. This was all that remained. Her dwindling rations for the long march ahead.

***

“And water in the desert, my friends,” the caravan master said with a sly smile, “is worth its weight in gold.”

Celdir jostled his pouch of dried apricots and frowned at its diminishing weight. He shrugged and popped a leathery piece into his mouth. A few paces away, beneath a cracked wall, the other scouts conversed with a local caravan master.

They were in the eastern markets, near the gate, where, allegedly, their captured envoy had departed unwillingly ten or eleven days prior. Colorful banners of silk and canvas flew overhead, catching every hue imagined in the mid-morning sun. Merchant stalls lined the cobbled streets. They bore wares from all corners of the world: alabaster statues so lifelike they seemed to dance, jewelry strung so fine it looked wrought by divine intent, spices so fragrant and deep they evoked nostalgia for an age long past. And to think all this sprang from the hands and minds of Men, or perhaps the Morben. A wonder that such ingenuity bloomed among those distant kin who refused the Valar’s beckoning.

The caravan master was built like a corsair: lithe and sinewy, with skin deeply tanned by a lifetime beneath the sun. The passing of the seasons had etched their lines into his face, yet beneath his greying brows, his amber eyes gleamed. A few strands of his hair peeked from beneath his garnet headscarf, rich and dark as pomegranate juice. Behind him stood a few wagons of pale wood with sturdy axles, accompanied by the snorts and bays of strange humpbacked creatures—camels, the scouts had been told. With apprehension, Celdir eyed their lolling jaws and lazy glances.

“Better than horses over the sand. Less need for water,” the merchant said, his amber eyes drifting from one elf to another, none of whom let their headscarves slip.

“Oh? But surely horses fare better for the plains and hills of Dorwinion and Rhun?” Tirloth asked, feigning curiosity.

The man snorted. “Sure. For the first hundred and twenty leagues. Then you hit the desert, and you’ll be drinking your piss.”

Tirloth wrinkled her nose. Saeroth scowled, unimpressed.

From his waist, Aeglas drew a plain pouch hemmed with copper thread. He gave it a shake, and dried leaves and sprigs spilled into his palm. Healing herbs, found in the depths of Greenwood, where the shadow had yet to spread. Standard issue for field scouts, but rare and prized beyond their borders. Now passed off as wares of a merchant couple: Aeglas and Tirloth.

The caravan master sniffed the herbs. A flicker of calculation passed through his eyes and then dissipated. He smiled. “So, what’s your asking price?”

Aeglas replied, “Depends on what the market bears. This is our first trip to Dorwinion; we wanted to see the lay of the land before committing.”

The merchant gave a noncommittal hum, still watching their faces.

“You know, tariffs, handling fees, insurance, all the usual expenses.”

“Yes, yes,” the man waved his hand as if he were flicking a fly. “Those can all be negotiated.” A pause. “Do you know where you want to sell them?” He rattled off a stream of names, some clipped and guttural, others breathy and melodic. They meant nothing to the elves.

The scouts exchanged a glance. They had discussed this the previous night when Saeroth had burst through the door of their cramped lodgings. He had tediously unraveled Thaladir’s words, that Tatharel was a fine gift, headed for the Lannish Jindûl. Likely a city or a port. All they needed to do now was to learn where it lay and intercept her route.

Aeglas said smoothly, “We would be interested in Lannish Jindûl.”

The merchant frowned. “You sure about that? Don’t let those bastards in the taverns fill your head with nonsense.”

Aeglas nodded.

The man muttered, “Lannish Jindûl…” he repeated to himself as if trying to swipe the linguistic sludge from the phrase.

Silence stretched. Celdir ate the last piece of his apricot, savoring the lingering sweetness.

“Ah!” the man exclaimed. The elves’ hearts lifted. Hope, at last.

“You mean, Lanaekh Jindûn!” His laughter rose, full and booming, echoing into the hot morning air. The joke was lost on the elves, but the merchant found it hilarious.

“And where is that?” Aeglas asked.

“Not where, my friend, but what.” The caravan master’s shoulders still shook with mirth. “Lanaekh Jindûn,” he said slowly, savoring each syllable, “Or in Common Speech? The Sapphire Road. A web of trade routes winding east through the desert.”

“Trade routes?” Tirloth echoed. “You mean actual roads?”

“Yes, and no. Not all roads are carved in stone. Some live here,” He tapped his head. His garnet headscarf fluttered in the wind. “Memory. Dust.”

The man shrugged. “Anything bound east goes through the Sapphire Road, no way around it. Spice, silk, slaves, secrets, you know, the typical lifeblood of empires.” His eyes flickered in the direction of the bidding squares, which clamored with pounding gavels and wailing of sundered kin.

The elves stiffened. After days of futile searching, breadcrumbs, hunches, half-clues, at last, something real. But their hope came holding hands with dread: she had not been sent to a city, but into the veins of a vast and shifting road.

The merchant paused, weighing his words. “With the bandits and pirates of late, the road to the desert has narrowed to only one. Overland, to the north, hugging the Inner Sea. Then it’s a few dozen leagues over the steppes before the desert swallows it whole. After that…the roads split.”

“What happens in the desert?” Aeglas asked softly.

“What does happen in the desert?” The man echoed with a grin. “Who can say? Each caravan master keeps their map here,” he tapped his chest, “not on parchment. If your wares vanish in the sands, well…” his smile thinned. “That’s what insurance is for.”

He leaned in, “Say, if you’re in the market, I know a man. Least dishonorable bastard I’ve met.”

Celdir glanced back at the camels with their drooping jaws and tongues slick with saliva. His throat tightened, parched. It felt as though the wind and the weight of what they had just heard had drawn every drop of moisture from him. Tirloth narrowed her eyes, mind racing—the feasibility of finding their quarry, how many leagues, how many rations, how swiftly they had to travel to intercept the caravan before it disappeared among the dunes. Aeglas toyed with the pouch of herbs, rolling the fabric between his fingers. Only Saeroth still smiled, his eyes as inscrutable as polished glass.

Sensing their hesitation, the man relaxed. “So,” he said with a shrug, “what do you think?”

Celdir knew he should not speak. He should hold his tongue. But the rot of Dorwinion, the blood, the sickness, the filth, had worn him thin. He had left Greenwood eager and idealistic, but the past days had ground down his resolve. And this…this felt like their best chances.

Fiery strands slipping loose from his headscarf, Celdir blurted, “Could you leave before sunrise? A caravan did. Ten days ago. Do you happen to know what it was carrying?”

His voice rang too loud, bouncing off the canvas awnings and stone walls. Around them, buyers and merchants stilled mid-bargain, heads turning.

Saeroth’s smile flickered and died. Aeglas’s eyes flashed, half warning, half disappointment. Tirloth shifted, weight tilting just enough to bolt.

The merchant blinked and started to rise. “Sorry, friends. Must be going.” His smile was watery and thin. “Pleasure doing business.”

Before he could depart, a man stepped from the shade. He was dressed in a tailored umber surcoat threaded with silver. A deep green sash marked with an embroidered seal draped across one shoulder. A short sword, likely ceremonial, hung at his waist. An inspector.

An unguent facsimile of a smile appeared on his face. “Gentlemen and lady,” he said, each word steeped in oil. “Is there a problem here?”

The merchant blanched.

Ever quick-witted and sly, Saeroth offered a deferential bow. “No, Officer, no trouble at all.”

“Is that so?” His eyes gleamed with predatory glee. “Because I distinctly heard someone inquiring about a specific caravan. I would be delighted to assist.”

“Officer, as we all know, caravans come and go from Dorwinion daily. My brother here had a few too many drinks last night. Believed whatever nonsense the merchants fed him over ale.” He added, with a pitying shake of the head, “He can barely count past the evening bell. Believes everything he hears, bless him.”

Celdir began to protest, but Saeroth turned a glance on him, cold as the Withered Heath. It silenced him at once.

The inspector tasted Saeroth’s words, weighing how much truth was mixed with falsities. His hand drifted to the hilt of his sword.

Aeglas opened his mouth, but Saeroth gave a subtle shake of the head. One more word, and they would reek of guilt.

At last, the man spoke, his voice slick, “Dorwinion does tend to overwhelm the untraveled.” His stance was loose, almost idle, but the light in his eyes betrayed his intent. A coiled viper about to strike. His words hung, baited.

The silence stretched. Saeroth gave a single cool nod.

With a flick of his wrist, disappointed by his escaping prey, the man turned. “Very well. But if caravan schedules interest you so much, you know where to find me.”

“Of course, thank you for your generosity.”

As the inspector disappeared around the corner, he glanced over his shoulder. “Enjoy your stay in Dorwinion. But do mind your words. You never know who is listening.”

Once the inspector vanished, the elves exhaled. Muttering a curse about foreigners, the caravan master made a swift exit, with creaking wagons and snorting camels in tow.

Saeroth turned on Celdir. Gone was his usual wit and sardonic smirk. His eyes burned, their edges sharp like fractured glass. “You. We will speak of this at the inn.”

Back at their lodgings, Saeroth paced the length of the room. Aeglas and Tirloth sat at the table, silent. Celdir had retreated to a corner, one knee pulled to his chest. On a bed, Thaladir slept.

“Do you have any idea, child,” Saeroth snarled, “what you nearly cost us?”

Celdir raised his hands, palms out. “I am sorry. But it felt like our best chance.”

Saeroth whirled on him. “We already had what we wanted. The Sapphire Road. The lone route east. The roads split in the desert.” His voice sharpened. “And you, with your ambition? Or just stupidity? You nearly shattered the whole plan.”

He mocked Celdir with lilting tones. “A caravan did. Ten days ago. Do you know what it carried? Why not go the full distance, ask if Tatharel was on board, gift-wrapped and bound?’” He ran a hand over his face. “By the Valar…”

“Easy, Saeroth,” Aeglas warned.

“I was trying to be useful,” Celdir snapped, fire flaring in his voice. Days of dead ends, filth, and failure had frayed all their tempers to threads.

Saeroth scoffed, muttering something sharp under his breath about being too young, too eager.

“Enough,” Tirloth cut in. She turned back to the crumpled map they had picked up in Dorwinion.“Let us focus. Based on what we have gathered, Lady Tatharel is no longer in Dorwinion. If she left eleven days ago, given the speed of caravan travel,” she paused, calculating. “She is likely along the northeastern coast of the Inner Sea. Maybe a hundred leagues from the desert.”

Aeglas asked, “If we travel swiftly, can we catch her before she crosses into the desert?”

Tirloth nodded, slow and grave. “Yes. But barely. Maybe a dozen leagues to spare, if that.”

“And our rations?”

“Should be enough, if we resupply here.”

“Then we had best update His Majesty,” Aeglas said, rising to fetch his satchel with ink and paper. “No more known falcon posts east of here. He should be warned of our silence until we return to Dorwinion.”

Now cooler, Saeroth added, “Include Thaladir’s phrase. His Majesty may appreciate the irony.” Aeglas acknowledged with a flick of his fingers.

“So…when do we depart?” Celdir asked from the corner.

“We,” Saeroth drawled, “are departing after we send the falcon and resupply. You are staying in Dorwinion.”

“What?” Celdir burst out, fist curling tight. “You are punishing me? Just for that? I can fix it, I promise—”

“Celdir,” Aeglas interrupted, quiet but firm. “Your fire is admirable. Truly. You will make a fine scout one day. But what happened in the markets? That could have derailed everything.” He paused. “We cannot afford another mistake.”

“But I—”

“Someone needs to see Thaladir home,” Tirloth added gently. “He is not strong enough to travel alone. And it is no small task.”

“I only wanted to help,” Celdir murmured.

“I know. Help takes many forms, and not all of them carry a blade.”

Celdir’s gaze fell. Tirloth’s words were true, but they still stung. His first mission beyond Greenwood, and he had bungled it so badly that they were sending him home like an unruly elfling. And his stomach twisted at the thought of facing His Majesty alone. His gaze drifted to Thaladir, who was still sleeping. The bruises were yellowing, cuts knitting shut. But not enough, not yet. Tirloth was right. Thaladir would not survive the journey alone. And no amount of coin could make an inn safe.

“All right,” he said, quiet and hoarse.

Aeglas nodded. “Do not fear. Unless His Majesty or Captain Calenhîr asks directly, we will not mention the market.” He glanced at Saeroth, “Right?”

Saeroth only grunted.

Taking that as agreement, Aeglas continued, “Once we send the falcon and resupply, we will leave. Celdir, when Thaladir is well enough to travel, send word of your departure to His Majesty. Use the standard cipher.”

Celdir nodded and crossed to Thaladir’s bedside. Gently, he smoothed a crease in the blanket.

By the far wall, Saeroth stared at the sunlight filtering through the grimy window. “A fine gift for the Sapphire Road…” he murmured.

Then he laughed, sharp, hollow, exhausted.

“Lady Tatharel,” he said under his breath, “you are one elusive envoy.”

***

There was heat. It clung to the vaulted caverns, warming the air and whispering of nearby fires. Screams echoed in the distance. The sing of drawn steel. The metallic tang of blood.

He peered into the darkness, lit in brief flashes by flickering torchlight. In the silver gleam of a mirror, a younger self gazed back. Pale hair braided in court fashion. A modest tunic and leggings. Eyes untouched by the breaking of worlds.

These were not his halls. This was Menegroth.

His breath quickened. He remembered this. The final fall of Doriath, where kin turned blades on kin.

He grabbed his sword and ran. Through the twisting walkways and hidden corridors, toward the heart of the kingdom. Toward whatever he could still save.

A cold thought surfaced: Where was she?

Though his quarters lay near the outer gates where flight would have been easy, he ran deeper into the city, toward the great houses of Doriath, where Dior and his noble kin resided. He swallowed the rising bile, tried to hold back the horror as the torchlight flickered over fallen kinsmen—friends, comrades, teachers—all struck down by Noldorin blades.

At last, he reached a grand council chamber. Bodies lay piled along the walls, Noldorin and Sindarin both, as a tangle of limbs and torsos. The polished stone floor ran slick with blood.

But it was the sight at the center that turned his blood to ice.

A dark-haired ellon leaned against the edge of an overturned table. He was tall and ruddy-faced, clad in dark mail and a crimson cloak. His mouth was harsh, and his eyes, crueler. All angles, no softness, no mercy. He wiped the gore from his sword with slow, practiced strokes.

Beside him stood an ellon with pale hair in neat plaits. He wore partial plate armor embossed with hounds pursuing stags. A fox-red split cloak hung from his shoulders. Thranduil did not recognize the dark-haired one, but this one he knew. Celegorm, that Feanorian who once coveted Lûthien.

And there, before them, stood Tatharel.

“Moryo,” Celegorm called, his tone amused. “Look at this little bird.”

He stepped towards Tatharel. “Dark hair, like her.” A wolfish smile split his face. “Thingol’s kin? Elmo’s line? Pity about the eyes. Spoils the illusion.”

He reached for her chin, tilting it with mock gentleness. “Still…a pale shadow is better than none.”

The other elf (Caranthir? Curufin? Thranduil could not remember) grunted, “Enough. We waste time with these Moriquendi. Slit her throat and be done. We need to find the King.”

“Impatient as always, aren’t you? Curvo is more fun,” Celegorm teased, his fingers trailing along her jaw in a warped caress. His eyes flicked to Thranduil. “Seems like you have a champion, little bird. Although he will not save you now.”

A flash of steel.

Thranduil lunged forward. He remembered how he had seized her hand and dragged her towards the dark tunnels. Celegorm, blood-frenzied, had started to follow, but his brother’s sharp words stayed his course.

They had found Elwing whimpering in a shadowed alcove. Without hesitation, Tatharel lifted the child in her arms. Together, they ran through the winding halls and secret paths known only to the Iathrim.

When they emerged into daylight, she looked up at him, her eyes green as new beech leaves. She whispered, “Thank you.”

So why then, did her chest erupt with Celegorm’s blade?

She had turned to flee, but the Noldo was faster.

Blood bloomed across her chest, soaking her sapphire robes. Her face twisted in agony and surprise. She crumpled, a leaf torn from the branch by a cruel wind.

As Celegorm wrenched his sword free, he flicked his blade once. Rivulets of blood—her blood—splattered in a savage arc across the polished stone.

Thranduil opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came.

His hand hung in the space where she had been, his fingers clutching at nothing.

From the far side of the chamber, laughter rang, sharp and cruel, as if some dark jest had been told. His dark-haired brother did not even look up. He continued to polish his blade with slow, methodical strokes as the chamber echoed with mirthless delight.

“So many little birds to hunt in Doriath,” Celegorm crowed, drunk on blood and delight. “And how sweet the songs they sang.”

Then, the vision fractured. The chamber, the blood, and the laughter melted away. Other scenes rushed in. Faster now. One after another.

In Sirion, amidst the ruined walls and broken homes, she stood in the wreckage, searching for the twins.

There she faced Maedhros, his copper hair gleaming like flame. He remembered trading blows with him, desperate to buy her time, before they fled to Balar.

So why then, was she bleeding, slashed from neck to waist, crimson soaking her shift?

In Mordor, during the final years of the siege, he remembered the arrow that struck her back and shattered her legs. He had pressed his cloak to the wound, staunched the bleeding, and carried her across the ash-choked plains to the healer’s tent.

Why then, was she sprawled in the dirt, legs limp and dark blood pooling beneath her?

In Dorwinion, he remembered the day she returned.

The scouts brought her home, sunburnt, parched, and roughened, but alive. She had crossed the teal gates of his palace with her back straight and eyes clear.

Why then, was she collapsed against a vineyard trellis, eyes closed, blood seeping into the fertile soil?

In every image, every nightmare, he tried to save her. But she always fell.

Her blood always splattered the earth. Her eyes always grew vacant with death. Yet, he remembered, oh he remembered. In truth, she had lived. It had been his hands that caught her, carried her, and saved her. Again. And again.

Maybe you did once. Now? Who can say? The voice of the pale-haired hunter who stalked him in nightmares spat the words like venom.

Thranduil jolted awake, chest heaving. Cold sweat clung to his brow. His heart pounded, wild and terrified, like a hart fleeing the sound of a distant horn.

No, it was not real, he told himself. Merely a dream.

Menegroth had fallen. Sirion had burned. The wretched Feanorians were long dead. Celegorm slain. His dark-haired brothers, cut down. Maedhros thrown into the fire. The Siege of Barad-dûr broke.

She lived—no, he corrected himself, she lives.

Yet, the singing of steel and the scent of blood clung to him like a pungent oil that curled around him, gripping his heart. What was dream? What was memory? Which one was true? Which, false?

He sat in silence, eyes wide in the pale pre-dawn, struggling to still his pounding heart. With shaky breath, he looked down at his hands. Long fingers. Clean nails. No dirt, no ash, no blood.

The same hands that had once held her. Protected her. Loved her.

So why then, did he feel these were the very hands that would doom her?

***

Somewhere beyond the salt flats and twilight, she walked.

The prickle of the tamarisk and the weeping of her blisters no longer troubled her.

The dull throb had faded to something distant. Narcotic. Almost gentle.

One foot forward, then the other.

Her body carried her eastward. Yet, her mind drifted west, chasing the setting sun, chasing the ages of memory.

She inhaled.

Beneath the burnt resin, dust, and salt, she tried to imagine the scent of lemons.

The air in his study shimmered with the aestival heat and afternoon light. Bright, the sunlight filtered through the fine glass of Near Harad and stained everything, from his hair to his beechwood desk and the jar of lemon preserves, in brilliant gold. Outside, he could hear the gentle flow of the Forest River and the buzzing of cicadas.

Yet, despite the warmth and beauty of the afternoon, a biting chill had taken root within Thranduil. Parasitic, it burrowed through marrow and sinew. There was no easy indolence, only tighter and tighter tension. The nightmares that had taken his breath away two nights prior still clung to him: visions of her drowning, choking, suffocating in blood, how her eyes, those beautiful, brilliant eyes, had glazed in death—No. He would not think of that.

The parchment on his desk had arrived a little after noontide. Tied to a falcon’s talon was a small scroll sealed with Greenwood’s crest of antlers interwoven with leaves. He waved Galion away and, with trembling fingers, loosened the scroll from the bird.

Finally, after days of empty waiting, something from the scouts. He unfurled the scroll, and his silver-blue eyes flew over the lines of cipher.

Not their cipher. Of course not.

He had so desperately hoped that the letter bore tidings of her recovery. That she had been found, and they journeyed westward along the Celduin. That even if she never again looked at him as she once had, at least she would be safe. Returned. Whole. If she wished to sail West, he would not stop her (When had he ever denied her anything?). At the very least, she would depart for the Blessed Realm from his halls. From home.

Hope, that gossamer-winged thing, stirred in his chest. His heart swelled at the thought of her return.

Line by line of ink, dark and leaden, sunk that hope.

To His Majesty,

Guard Thaladir located. Injuries grave but stable. Delirious at first; now lucid. Confirms Lady Tatharel was separated and taken eastward some weeks prior. Specific date unknown. Companion Orthelian still unaccounted for.

Phrase heard from captors: “Likha yume’et, na lannish jindûl-san.” Scout Saeroth proposed gloss:

“Likhad yumek’et, nai Lanaekh Jindûn sa. A worthy gift, for the Sapphire Road.”

Lanaekh Jindûn confirmed by local caravan master: not a place but a trade corridor east of Dorwinion. Current route restricted due to coastal unrest. Convoys forced north along the Inner Sea, then into the desert, where the routes split.

Caravan matching time and description departed eleven days ago. We will pursue immediately with intent to intercept before desert entry.

Dorwinion conditions grim. Decay and illness, source of pestilence unknown. Broken governance. Inspectors are corrupt, unrestrained. Bidding floors run openly beside spice trade. Flesh markets in public squares.

Celdir and Thaladir remain behind. Thaladir unfit for travel. Celdir assigned escort duty. Full debrief to follow. No known falcon posts east of Dorwinion. Anticipate silence until our return. 

His eyes traced the phrase, “A fine gift for the Sapphire Road.” And again. He gave a short, humorless laugh. A gift. That was all she was to her captors. A pretty trinket to be pawned and exchanged. Marked for a path that, in a cruel twist of irony, bore the color of her father’s house.

A reminder of the eternity her captors could never have.

An instrument.

A thing.

As if she had not once led their people to survive among the ashes in Sirion and Mordor.

As if she had not once looked at him with the stars of Beleriand in her eyes—

He closed his eyes. And stilled. She was on a caravan that had departed eleven days ago, bound for the Last Desert. Where the roads narrowed to only one, before they fanned out among the dunes, innumerable and untraceable, beyond the reach of three scouts.

They had to find her before then. Before the vastness of the sands took her. They had to.

The polite knock at his door drew him from his reverie.

“Enter.”

Faeron entered, his dark hair catching runs of copper and brown in the sunlight. Gone was his usual sly levity, for he knew his lord had no taste for mirth in this matter.

Behind him came Silor, the Warden of the Northern Eaves and Tatharel’s first pupil. Linduilas followed; she was the Chief Scribe of Greenwood, a quiet and bookish elleth who commanded the Royal Archives with fearsome precision. Finally, his faithful steward Galion entered and closed the door behind him.

Thranduil said nothing. Instead, he passed the parchment to Faeron, who read the words with a slow, thoughtful deliberation, his gaze flickering between the dark letters and his lord’s eyes. Wordlessly, he handed the scroll to Silor. Then to Linduilas. Then to Galion.

One by one, they read.

The silence deepened.

“Well?” Thranduil asked.

Faeron thought for a moment longer and then began:

“The circumstances are certainly…precarious,” he said. “But not beyond salvage. The desert is vast, yes, but the scouts now have a route and a plan for interception. She offers her captors value, which ensures her life. Hope yet remains.”

“Is there now?” His lord’s voice was soft but barbed. “Faeron, I asked for insight, not reassurance.”

Faeron stiffened. A curl of wounded pride laced through his carefully neutral expression. He pressed his lips together in a flat smile and inclined his head, eyes lowered. “My lord, you ask for certainty, which none of us can offer.”

Thranduil spared him another glance and then fell into silence.

Ever pragmatic, a quality prized by his tutor, Silor murmured, “East of Dorwinion and towards the Last Desert…” His eyes misted over in contemplation as he tried to call to mind the geography: the rivers, the mountains, the plains of the region. The roads, the lifeblood of trade and empires.

None came forth.

He turned to Linduilas. “My lady, do we have any maps showing the region east of Dorwinion? Or perhaps any records showing wine trade or commerce, anything that might mark the routes?”

From a satchel, the scribe unrolled scrolls of maps, ledgers, and treaties, anything that might offer insight to their envoy’s fate. But every map ended at the Inner Sea of Rhûn. Save for Dorwinion, a blot of gentle hills and grapevines marked on its northwestern shore, the area was blank. No rivers, no plains, no mountains, no roads. Nothing. A quiet fade into the parchment’s edge, where the eastern edges of the Sea yielded to the ornamental border.

The ledgers and treaties offered only tallies of coins exchanged and quantities delivered, but nothing of how they arrived in Dorwinion. Only of how they departed west along the Celduin.

Silor smiled and shook his head. He glanced at the window, at the setting sun drifting westwards.

The empty spaces mocked him.

Jaws tight, eyes hard, Thranduil asked, “And what of this Rhûnish phrase? Is there anyone in the halls fluent enough to confirm Saeroth’s words?”

“Only Lady Tatharel,” Galion said, quietly apologetic. “She was the only one here who took such an interest. Perhaps there are others in Imladris or Lothlórien.”

Linduilas nodded. “There are some with a rudimentary understanding of the tongue. But, this…” she glanced at the parchment again, “appears to be a blend. A creole, perhaps. I fear none here can offer a better gloss than Saeroth.”

Thranduil let out a slow breath. “Of course,” he said, bitterness lacing each word. “The only one with a grain of competence in this court is gone, and we sent her east. And for what? A few barrels of autumn Dorwinion?”

None dared to answer him.

Or remind him that she had been half-forced, half-willing into the diplomatic post.

“And what of this Sapphire Road?” he asked. “Is that recorded in the archives?”

The scribe shook her head. “No, Your Majesty. From Captain Aeglas’s message, it does not appear to be a formal path, merely an abstract idea. A cultural concept among the traders who travel east of Dorwinion.”

Thranduil did not speak. Instead, he traced the northern edge of the Inner Sea, along the route she had been taken. His fingers followed the curves of the shore, at times soft and graceful, at times harsh and angular. Was it rolling hills and grassy plains she crossed? Or was it humid fens and dense woods? Or barren scrublands and mountainous steppes?

The map rested in placidity.

Useless. All this was useless. Despite the scouts’ letter, the ornate maps, the centuries of carefully-kept ledgers, there was nothing. Bitter regret rose within him: in their arrogance, they had never cared to learn what was beyond Dorwinion.

Just epistemological emptiness.

Though he neither spoke nor raged, the stillness of his form and the waves of seething ire warned his courtiers not to interrupt. They wisely stayed their tongues.

The study door opened. A messenger entered and knelt. He bore a scroll sealed with golden wax, embossed with silver trees and a crown of seven stars. From Celeborn, Lord of the Golden Woods, and Tatharel’s daeradar.

Thranduil ran his thumb under the seal and broke the wax. The others politely averted their gaze.

Four austere words lined the parchment.

I ride for Greenwood.

“Leave me.” His eyes did not leave the missive.

The others bowed and withdrew. Their paces were courtly and polite, but the speed betrayed their eagerness to flee His Majesty, who was now like a beast with its hind leg trapped in a vicious snare.

Faeron’s eyes lingered on the golden seal before he, too, departed.

Of course, the Lord of Lothlórien did not rage or fling accusations. He was too old and far too wise for that. Harsh words would change nothing, only wound diplomacy further.

Yet, silver-haired Celeborn would not let this insult, this personal affront, slip by unacknowledged. No, that esteemed Sindarin prince, who had raised Tatharel’s mother, his brother’s daughter, as his own, and stood in Sûlthir’s stead after the High Councilor sailed West, would demand answers.

For his kin, for the promises he made to the others.

For a dark-haired and grey-eyed father waiting on the shores of Alqualondë for an alabaster ship that might never arrive.

Thranduil creased the letter and flicked it to the corner of his desk, next to a tray of tarts and lemon preserves.

Let him come.

He glanced at the strewn maps. With a single motion, he raked them off his table. The parchments floated in the air for a moment, then settled on the floor, as soft and—his chest heaved, elegant as her disappearance.

Then, almost with contrition and shame, he bent down and gathered the maps. He retraced the northeastern edge of the Sea’s shores, again and again, until the parchment chafed his skin.

Fine. So they knew not the lands east of Dorwinion. But he had sent his scouts, who were now bound eastward. They would map the unknown. They would find her.

Every dark sea. Every endless desert. Every corner of Arda.

His cartographic quill and compass.

“Hold fast.” The words tasted like ash. As if she had not done so already, over so many lifetimes. As if there were anything left to ask her.

“Just a while longer.”

***

“It should be up ahead,” Tirloth murmured as she tilted her chin towards a distant rise on the horizon.

Saeroth and Aeglas nodded, and the three scouts, fleet-footed and silent, slipped across the scrubland. For the past five days, they had followed the rutted tracks of wagon marks as they journeyed eastwards, careful to stay a ways off the path proper to avoid drawing attention from other caravans. The northern shore of the Inner Sea was a land that, despite embracing the water, saw scarce rainfall. They had passed by the barren salt flats, the saxauls with sparse patches of ephedra, and the scuttling of the polecats and lizards. Salt and metal, perhaps the iron of blood, tinged the air.

Though the grace of Eru had shaped their bodies to endure the heat and cold, even they felt the sweltering days and the frigid nights. For mortals, the path would have broken them: sometimes uneven and jagged, at others soft and collapsing underfoot, the ground would have shown no mercy to well-provisioned travelers, much less to prisoners.

Tirloth had whispered three days into their course, “This is no road for an envoy.”

Saeroth had merely grunted, “Her captors certainly were considerate enough to strip her of even shoes. Or a cloak.” His dappled traveling cloak fluttered in the harsh breeze.

They spoke less and less. The grim determination of retrieving their envoy and the pressing urgency of intercepting her settled heavily in their hearts.

Earlier that morning, the elves had finally emerged from the northeastern shore of the Sea and into the steppes, which marked the final stretch before the Sapphire Road opened to the desert, where the single artery of the pass branched into innumerable tributaries.

The elves arrived at the foot of the rocky outcrop that rose far above the vast plains of feathergrass and wild rye. They lingered in the shadows, waiting for the convoy that bore their quarry.

The air carried the pungent scents of wild onions and sweet accords of artemisia. The sun drifted overhead at high noon.

There was only silence. No convoys.

“Well?” Saeroth muttered as he leaned against the craggy surface, “Where is she?”

“Perhaps we are early,” Tirloth offered, but the tightness at the corner of her eyes betrayed her worry. She crouched to the ground to re-inspect the wagon tracks. “Too many wagon ruts. No way to tell which one was hers, but this is where they all pass.”

Saeroth rolled his eyes. “Still doesn’t explain where she is.” He swatted away a pale frond of feathergrass.

Aeglas, their leader, swept his eyes over the flat landscape. “Saeroth is right. It has been an hour or two. We would have found her by now.”

“By Manwë’s beard,” Saeroth hissed, “we lost her. If her captors were delayed, we would have seen them from behind.”

Tirloth nodded in agreement. “And we have not seen any wagon trails that veered from the main path, which means that she was not taken by another road.”

Aeglas tilted his head in contemplation. “So, that means she has gone ahead.”

His words lingered in the air, as bitter as the landscape.

Saeroth’s eyes narrowed to slits. He drew his features into a sharp scowl. “So we have lost our only chance of finding her before the desert.” He laughed, derisive and harsh. “Well, this has been a complete failure and waste of time.”

Aeglas and Tirloth tensed at his words, but did not speak. After a long moment, when the winds had carried off Saeroth’s words, Tirloth said, “So, they went ahead. Into the desert. There are no fires, dung pits, or evidence of wheel repairs. They did not stay long here. What drove them to haste?”

Aeglas replied, “Bandits?”

She shook her head. “No, we would have seen broken wagons, spilled loot, or bodies.” Tirloth pointed at the track of wagon ruts. “The wagon paths are too smooth. They moved with intent, not with the panic of raids.”

“So a clean and hasty departure.”

“Yes.” Ignoring Saeroth sulking a few paces away, Tirloth gazed back at the horizon, hoping to see in the distance an incoming caravan that would prove her wrong. There was nothing.

She sighed and turned her gaze eastwards, where she could make out the steppes dissolving into the golden dunes of the desert. No wagons in that direction either.

Then, between the pale green patches of wormwood and flaxen rye, she saw something. Waving to the others, she ran over to a shrub of rye.

Her heart pounding in her throat, Tirloth touched a scrap of grey fabric hanging from a frond. The unassuming wool had nearly faded among the rippling grass, but not enough to escape the sharp-eyed tracker. Her companions arrived at where she was kneeling.

“Is that what I think it is?” Aeglas asked.

She nodded. “Wool,” she murmured, rolling the fabric between her fingers. “Likely of Greenwood make.” Tirloth passed the shred to Aeglas, who ran his hand over the cloth meant for both function and ceremony. It was fraying at the edges as the threads slipped loose, but without doubt, the construction was elven.

Saeroth reached out to feel the fabric. “So, her captors didn’t bother to strip her completely. Either they were careless or arrogant that she would not be found.”

Aeglas did not answer him. He looked westwards, at the outcrop where they had waited and at the edges of the Inner Sea in the distance. Although they were many leagues from the shore, he could still see the mid-day’s heat shining on the waters and refracting into countless shards of light.

“Well, Captain?” Saeroth said, voice edged. “What next?”

“She continues eastward, even farther than we had originally planned,” Aeglas said.

“This wasn’t our original plan, but should we follow her into the desert?” Tirloth asked. Her hands trembled slightly, whether from exhaustion or apprehension, she could not say.

“Oh, this gets even better,” Saeroth snarked. The days of travel, the rot of Dorwinion, and the choking dread of their increasingly hopeless mission were unraveling their resolve. “First, Dorwinion, a nightmare. Then, a hundred leagues across the misery that is the Sea of Rhûn. And now, the desert? This is madness.”

“We’re all tired, Saeroth,” Aeglas said. Strands of his hair were escaping his braids. “I know we have little to no experience tracking in the desert, but we have to try.” He paused. “We owe His Majesty that much.” The uneasy words settled on his tongue.

“Do we? Captain Calenhîr gave no room to reject his recommendation for this mission,” Saeroth’s eyes narrowed. “As much as I respect Lady Tatharel, I’m not about to cavort into the desert in what’s likely a suicide attempt.”

Aeglas’s eyes flared with frustration. “You’re welcome to turn around, Saeroth. And explain to His Majesty why you gave up when we had found a trace of Lady Tatharel’s whereabouts. I’m sure he would be delighted.”

Saeroth huffed something derogatory under his breath, but did not argue further.

Aeglas turned to Tirloth. “How confident are you in tracking in the desert?”

She shrugged. “Like you said, little to none. We have spent our lives beneath Greenwood’s eaves.”

“Do you think you can do it?”

She stilled, weighing her words. “The road thus far has not been too difficult,” she conceded. “If the desert is similar, then yes, with some effort.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh for Valar’s sake,” Saeroth snapped. “Make up your mind already. She’s slipping away as we dawdle.”

Aeglas sent him a sharp look and glanced back at Tirloth.

She tilted her chin and set her jaw, her eyes clear. “I am the keenest-eyed tracker of the Northern Eaves. If it is necessary to pursue Lady Tatharel into the desert, I will do it. By my honor as a scout.”

He nodded. “And what of our supplies?”

“Enough for three days. Five if we ration.”

Saeroth grumbled something about fading if he had to drink his own piss, like the caravan master had said in Dorwinion. He kicked at a clump of brittle grass, the toe of his boot hewing at the dirt. He was not convinced of the plan, least of all of its success. But what choice did he have? He served at the pleasure of the realm, his comfort or fate be damned.

A heavy silence settled over them. The elves knew this was their final hope, their desperate attempt to enter the desert, a vastness so unknown to them that it threatened to engulf them, bones and all, should they fail. There was no quelling the trepidation in their hearts. The safe choice was to turn back, return to Greenwood, and face his Majesty’s ire for a failed mission.

But she was just up ahead. Somewhere. They had to try. They had to.

Aeglas looked east, where the shrubs gave way to the amber sand. His braids slipped loose in the wind. He tied them back.

“Well, shall we?”

The other scouts answered by quickening their pace, towards their elusive envoy, whom they hoped, in the deepest parts of their hearts, still lived.

Behind them, as if in resonance with the Music, the vast expanse of wild rye and feathergrass swayed, unspeaking witnesses to all that passed: unions and partings, triumphs and tragedies, the moments remembered and forgotten.

***

She had been dreaming of that night in Menegroth when the clashing of steel tore through her reverie. The silver lamplight, the stately music, that bright-eyed, star-crowned youth faded, his laughter drifting into halls to which there was no return.

Her vision flooded with endless gold. Sand, for as far as the eye could see. A cloudless sky above. The scorching grains underfoot.

The shores of the Inner Sea had been a fen compared to the bone-dryness of the desert. Kicked up by the hooves of baying beasts, dust filled her nose and throat. She coughed and readjusted her tattered cloak. Despite the blazing heat, she kept the garment, tethered as much to her duty, her loyalty, her pride, as to Greenwood itself.

The screams in the distance.

The ring of blade against blade.

The sand growing wet with blood.

Her gaze slowly focused. Figures, blurred by the heat, drew shining swords. Wagons lay capsized, their wares of pottery, glass, and people spilled across the sand.

Shouts in a foreign tongue, a creole, perhaps. She drew on every strand of willpower to force her mind to translate. Her linguistic talent, once-prized, ground haltingly like a rusted hinge.

R…rai…raid

Raid.

Her breath hitched. Was this her chance? They had kept her under close watch, ever since her house arrest weeks ago…or was it months? She could not remember.

In Doriath, she had been trained to consider all possibilities.

To weigh each consequence.

Each risk.

Each benefit.

Never to move without understanding the ripples it would cause.

Her father’s words surfaced, worn smooth like river stone:

Remember, iellig.To act is to release an arrow from its bow. It cannot be pursued, not even by a thousand steeds.

She had lived by those words for millennia.

Three steps ahead. Always.

Weighing the obvious. The subtle. The unseen.

But there was no time to consider all that.

The skirmish would end soon.

Someone would see.

There would not be another chance. Not here. Not under these skies.

If she was going to act, it had to be now.

For the third time in her long life, she acted without calculation.

(The first had been loving him. The second, following him east to Greenwood.)

She looked once at the sun, gathered her grey cloak, and ran.

“Wait, Saeroth,” Aeglas panted behind him. “Tirloth needs a moment.”

Saeroth turned around to face the others. He raised his sunburnt face, raw and peeling, to the merciless desert sun. His chapped lips, crusted with weeping blisters and dried blood, quivered in the light, opening slightly to draw in the absent moisture. His hands moved listlessly to the curved dagger at his hip, his fingers tracing the handle’s leather bindings before moving to his water flask.

The other two elves did not fare any better. Tirloth had collapsed in the sand, face down into the dunes in a sprawl of limbs. Her cloak, torn at the edges, fluttered in the wind with helplessness. Aeglas kneeled beside her, his lips cracked and throat stinging, as he helped Tirloth to rise. He murmured encouragement to her, and the air carried echoes of “Tirloth, rise. Just a little further. If you don’t get up now, the desert will claim you.”

With a groan, she rose, not with any clarity of will, but with a procedural assembly of muscles and tendons. She staggered a step. Aeglas steadied her and brushed the grains from the scrape on her face.

Saeroth blinked his aching eyes, sun-scorched and scratched by the swirling grit, and forced himself to focus. Ever since they entered the desert two days prior in a final, desperate attempt to locate their quarry, a sweltering torpor had seized them. At times, it loomed forefront in their minds, blossoming in bold, searing splashes; at times, it retreated to the background, lurking like a wolf drawing ever closer to its prey.

He shook his head, Limp strands of his hair slipped loose and brushed past his cheeks. He hissed as they grazed over the blistered skin.

They had been too proud, overly confident in their skills of navigating this inhospitable land. Tracking in the semi-arid shores of the Inner Sea and the steppes had not been too difficult, but this sea of sand that stretched for countless leagues in every direction, with nothing but the empty sky above, was too much. Where there had been clear wagon tracks and flattened grass before, they counted themselves fortunate if they could make out the wheel ruts before the wind erased the path. They had followed the markings found by their envoy’s cloak fragment into the desert, but the half-obscured trails had led them into many dead ends and re-circling in the past two days. Not to mention the caravan master’s words that the Sapphire Road would branch into innumerable tributaries in the desert…

Saeroth dug his boot toe into a dune. A small plume of dust and sand rose, as if in protest, or perhaps, in mockery.

And now, they were stuck here in the desert, chasing their own shadows.

They had calculated their rations and water supply before entering the desert, thinking it would be a third increase in consumption compared to the woodland or steppes, but they had been too inexperienced. They had failed to account for the paradoxical thirst that had gripped them near dusk of their first day: sipping water only intensified their thirst. Every drop burned as it slid down their parched throats, and a half-delirious insanity settled. More water, more…more.

Their supplies were dangerously low, and if things continued as they were, he doubted they would leave the desert whole, not to mention their envoy, whom he was sure was in a far worse condition than they.

Tirloth and Aeglas had finally caught up. The raw patch on her cheek glistened under the sunlight.

“W…w…water,” she wheezed, a dry brittle sound, like the last rattle of an autumn leaf before it fell from the branch.

Aeglas gently unfastened her water pouch from her pack, uncorked it, and pressed it to her lips. She sucked greedily. A few drops dribbled past her chin and fell onto the sands where they evaporated.

“Slowly Tirloth,” he murmured. “Too much at a time will get you sick.”

She finished, and Aeglas recorked the pouch. He frowned as he shook it, its weight growing ever lighter.

The delirious haze in the elleth’s eyes seemed to lift for a moment as she narrowed her eyes to scan the horizon. To Saeroth and Aeglas, it all seemed the same: a flat, endless line of shifting dunes.

Her gazed sharpened to a spot on the horizon.

“There,” she breathed. “An irregularity in the sands.”

“Are you sure?” Saeroth asked. “The sun and sands play tricks on the mind.” In the past two days, they had learned with chilling first hand experience of the cruelty of desert mirages. How the sky reflected false images created from heat and light, luring unsuspecting travelers, or in their case, inexperienced scouts into pursuing vestiges of hope, no more substantial than dreams.

Tirloth fixed Saeroth with a burning gaze.

“Yes, I’m sure.” she gritted out. “It’s there. In the distance. I saw what I saw.”

Saeroth and Aeglas exchanged a glance. They had been on far too many false leads the past day, but what choice did they have? Any semblance of free will had hardened into fate the moment they chose to follow their quarry into the desert.

“We follow.” Aeglas’s words carried over the wind.

He received a single nod from Saeroth. Tirloth merely started half-running, half-hobbling towards the distant point in the horizon.

When they arrived at Tirloth’s point, a single thought flickered through Saeroth’s mind, quick as the snap of a bowstring:

Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.

Good news was that the irregularity Tirloth had spotted was not another mirage.

Bad news was that the irregular was the wreckage site of a caravan.

On further evaluation, there’s only bad news.

Splintered wood and bent metal, likely the remnants of wagon frames and axles, jutted half-buried from the sand. The dunes were wet with dark patches, crimson, the evidence of recent bloodshed. Flashes of silver glinted among the dusk. Saeroth grunted as he pulled at one, and a blade curved like the crescent moon, its hilt wrapped with foreign silksm, emerged. He held it to the light, and faint runes of an unknown hand glimmered gold.

Next to the blades were…he prodded at the brown bit, and with growing horror, realized what he thought was another piece of flotsam was in fact, fingers. A hand from which he had pulled the foreign blade.

His heart sank. His pulse throbbed in his throat. Everything was too fast. Too bright. The desert air keened with the buzzing of bees although he knew there were no wildflowers for leagues around.

Had they lost their envoy again? Had they once again been too late? Had she finally sipped beyond their grasp, beyond the knowledge of their kind, and perhaps, beyond the dominion of the Valar?

No. He clamped down hard on the thought. There is no evidence this is the caravan that took her.

A startled sound interrupted his thoughts. He turned to see Aeglas and Tirloth crouched on the ground, pawing at the dirt with their bare hands. With lumbering steps, weighed down by the lethargy of the heat, he joined them.

He peered over their shoulders as they dug frantically at the grains, caring not for the grit scraping against their fingers or for the dirt underneath their nails.

A small bronze token, unmistakable, trivial even, among the wrecked wood, warped wheels, and gold and indigo silks scattered across the dunes.

Yet, there was no mistaking the small carved leaves among interlocked antlers: the seal of Greenwood, of His Majesty’s house.

“Is that…” Saeroth began. His words, usually so quick and sly, failed him.

Without pausing, Aeglas replied, “A guard’s token. Ceremonial. Likely Orthelian’s.” His voice was flat and clipped, as expected of a soldier, yet there was something that trembled underneath, like a crumbling dike of sand against the raging sea.

Finally, they freed the token. It was warm. One edge, near the base of the crest where the leaves furled outwards, was dented.

“Orthelian was here…is here,” Tirloth’s frantic words carried over the wind. “He is definitely here. We just have to find him, he is still alive. He has to be.” Her fingers pawed at the sand, her cuticles raw and now seeping blood. The scarlet rivulets mixed with the dust.

Saeroth and Aeglas watched her for a few more moments, but when it was clear no body was emerging from her futile efforts, Aeglas placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Tirloth,” he whispered.

“No!” She whipped her head around, eyes blazing with tears. “He’s not—not” she could not bring herself to finish her sentence. “He’s here, he’s here!” she choked out, as if repeating the words could make it true.

Aeglas’s hand on her shoulder grew firm. With his eyes shining with grief, he too could not trust himself to speak. He slowly shook his head.

“From the blood on the dunes and the wreckage, there was likely a skirmish. Desert bandits, perhaps. And a sandstorm that swept through and buried everything,” Saeroth said. “Even if all this was recent, with Orthelian buried that deep or slain, there is little chance he lives.”

A strangled sob escaped her, the sound a tribute to the countless lives the desert claimed. Her eyes burned, and suddenly, she drew her lips into a snarl.

‘You,” she spat at Saeroth. “For this entire mission, you have offered nothing but pessimism.” Her voice rose to a high-pitched, hysterical lilt. “It was always can’t do this, she’s already likely gone, woe to poor me. Can’t you offer anything useful?”

One of the few remaining threads of Saereoth’s patience and sanity snapped.

“Useful? Please. I’ve been plenty useful. If it weren’t for me, we would still be chasing our tails in Dorwinion! Who do you think parsed Thaladir’s words? It wasn’t you, that’s for sure.”

“Enough. Both of you.” Aeglas cut in. “We have more important things to do than squabble over your petty differences.”

Saeroth tch’d and looked away. Tirloth resumed her frenzied digging.

Their leader continued, “Since Orthelian’s token was found, and we have no reason to assume Lady Tatharel was taken on a separate caravan…” His eyes flickered to the broken wheels protruding from the sand. “The wheel markings are consistent with the ones next her cloak fragment in the steppes.”

A brief pause lanced through the air as Aeglas considered his next words very carefully.

“This is it. We lost her. We have to turn back or we all die here.”

The torpor of the desert heat and their own exhaustion delayed Saeroth and Tirloth’s realizations. Their pupils widened, and their breath quickened at the implications of Aeglas’s words. A fresh wave of grief and panic washed over them.

Tirloth tilted her blistered face back and laughed—no, rather, screamed at the sky. The hollow, mirthless sound was forced through scorched vocal cords and past her split lips.

“No, no, Aeglas, you’re wrong.” The delirious haze of dehydration, of exposure, of failure returned. “You don’t know if she was taken with him. She might still be out there, she might have escaped, we just have to find her.” She staggered to her feet, scrambling to find any trace of tracks in the sand.

She pointed at a blank patch of sand, smooth save for the ripples blown by the wind. “Look, there are her tracks. Footsteps. That lead away. Can’t you see?” She raised her quivering hand, dust-bitten and still gently bleeding, pointing east. “No, no.” She muttered to herself. “The tracks point that way.” She jerked her hand north.

Aeglas gave her a pitying look.

Tirloth made to follow the imprints made by her desperation. Before she could take another ragged step, Aeglas held her back with a hand at her elbow. She strained against him, like a wild kine brought to the yoke.

“Let me go! I have to find her, I have to, I, I—” her voice collapsed into wracks of wild wailing, at times low and lugubrious, at times, keening, rising to the heavens unmoved. Her body crumpled as she dug her fingers into the sand. Her tears, hot and futile, fell, and like all moisture in the desert, quickly vanished.

Aeglas crouched beside Tirloth and draped an arm around her. Although his own voice was thick with sorrow and weighed low, he whispered words of encouragement to her, in the native Silvan tongue, as if the cadences of the forest could anchor them in this land where no trees grew, as if this were all a fever dream from which they would wake and find themselves beneath sturdy boughs of oak and beech.

A few steps away, unlike Tirloth’s dramatic display of emotion, Saeroth felt the sinking feeling he had earlier return with a ruthless gravity. His gut dropped, the impact of a pebble sinking into the river currents, sharp, weighted, final.

The exhaustion of the mission, ever since they had left Greenwood, the twists and turns, the hope and repeated disappointments, and now, the finality of their failure, was too much.

He was done.

To an unbidden melody enshrouded within the desert wind, he sank, down and down to a soft mound of sand. The grains were not so harsh, he thought. There was a certain comfort, an enticing beckoning, to let the grief of the world wash over him.

He was so tired. Let him be entombed within the sand. Let the wind and heat be his eternal companions. Let the sun nourish his bones.

That way, he would not have to face His Majesty, face his own failure, wrought by cruel incompetence and tearless fate.

His eyes misted as they began to close. Distantly, he heard someone yelling his name. Celdir? No, that fiery-spirited youth had been left back in Dorwinion. And for good measure too; the desert would have wrecked the boy with his fëa in tatters.

Through his aching eyes, Aeglas’s face came into view. The captain’s braids now flew unbound as he gripped and shook Saeroth’s shoulders. His mouth moved, but to Saeroth, the sound felt far away, as if it were uttered from leagues away, not inches.

A sharp sting across his cheeks. Saeroth sucked in the air through his teeth. Belatedly, he realized he had been slapped. His gaze focused slightly, and Aeglas’s voice grew louder.

“Saeroth! Get up. It’s over. We’re going home.”

He produced an agonal croak.

“Let me…let me sleep.” His mind drifted back towards the sweet temptation of death.

Another slap.

“No. You’re getting up and we’re going home. The three of us. If you want to die after that, you can ask His Majesty.” A jerk at his shoulders. Aeglas was hauling him upright.

A soft wheeze. “What about her body?”

“We’re scouts. We don’t have the time or strength to dig through the dunes for her. If she escaped, we cannot afford to continue looking for her. I will not be responsible for two more deaths.”

Saeroth stumbled for a step or two as his vision cleared, and he dusted flecks of grain off his tunic and leggings.

“What about His Majesty?”

“What about him? The cloak scrap and Orthelian’s token are evidence enough.” Aeglas’s voice was tight, as if he was trying to convince himself. “If you’re worried about this affecting your promotion, I’ll handle it.”

“Don’t think there’s much of a future left for me. Not in Greenwood.”

“Well, take it up with Captain Calenhîr when you return. Come now. Plenty of opportunity for collapse in Greenwood.”

When Saeroth steadied, Aeglas let go of him, and turned to Tirloth who was face-down in the sand, her wails now reduced to quiet sniffles. He helped her rise and gently brushed the grit from her weeping blisters. She made weak sounds of protest, but provided no resistance against Aeglas’s efforts.

The three elves, one willing and two not wholly unwiling, faced west, towards the path of the afternoon sun. Saeroth glanced over his shoulder, and for a moment, out in the horizon, he saw a figure. Dark, grey-indigo, its edges indistinct, too distant to make out any meaningful details. A wild panic bloomed within his chest.

“Aeglas,” he breathed.

Aeglas turned his head to gaze at the horizon. His eyes stilled, but he did not speak.

Saeroth blinked.

The wind rose.

The figure was gone.

“We return to Greenwood.” Aeglas’s voice was soft, but beneath it, there was a terrible, quiet weight.

“Did you see—”

“Now.”

As the scouts began their journey westward, with dwindling supplies and water, Saeroth thought that regardless of whether Tatharel or Orthelian lived or perished, the desert had claimed at least three lives. Even if they left it, a part of them died in the sands.

***

She thought she knew physical pain from her doomed glaive practices in her youth. She was in her fortieth year when her father thought it a wise idea to teach her the art of the weapon. His weapon. Of course, all knew Sûlthir as a wise and prudent lord, the High Councilor to Elu Thingol. Yet, by the time of her youth in Doriath, nearly five centuries after the first rising of the Sun, most had forgotten that on the Great Journey he wielded the glaive with such mastery that Thingol, then Elwë, had looked twice at this dark-haired, grey-eyed youth, who in time, became his brother in all but blood.

Her father, in a rare moment of foolishness, had believed that since Tatharel took to statecraft so readily, surely she would inherit his talent with the glaive.

She showed him exactly how wrong he was.

They were by a clearing near the Esgalduin, where the willow trees dipped their slender branches into the water. She had in her hands a wooden practice glaive, and he, with his alloyed silver. On the side spectating was Thranduil, recently arrived to court from Neldoreth, and he had mumbled to her some excuse of watching Sûlthir with the polearm. She had rolled her eyes at his hopeless shyness but allowed him to trail her to the clearing. Her father merely looked at the boy once and handed Tatharel her weapon.

“Iellig,” Sûlthir said. “The glaive is not a sword. You cannot just mindlessly slash. It requires patience, balance, and foresight.”

With awkward steps, Tatharel swung her glaive at Sûlthir, who easily parried and took advantage of her opening to give a few instructory raps to her shoulders, hips, and knees.

Although they were light strikes, she was no warrior. The pain bloomed, bright and hot. Her step faltered. She miscalculated the momentum. The bladed tip swung wide, whistling close to Thranduil'‘s ear. He had stepped closer to better watch Sûlthir’s strikes. A few strands of his blonde hair floated to the ground. His eyes, as blue as the Esgalduin’s waters, were blown wide, and his breath came out in short pants.

Tatharel was mortified. She threw down her glaive and despite her aching joints, rushed over to check on him and muttered, “Breathe, Thranduil. It was close, but you’re okay. You still have your head and arm.” His lips quivered at her sudden closeness, his eyes widened further, and his breaths became even quicker.

Sûlthir glanced at them, a thoughtful look in his grey eyes. Something flickered in his gaze, a flash of silver scales, before it disappeared in the current.

He said mildly, as if he had not nearly witnessed the death of a minor lordling, “Tatharel, we will focus on your letters.”

And that had been the end of her weapon training.

She grunted something in reply and then led Thranduil further down the riverbank, calling over her shoulder about watching marshgrass and herons for one of Daeron’s assignments (or rather, Daeron’s senior apprentices since he, barely tolerated by polite society, had gone east after the whole debacle with Lúthien).

She remembered how she had half limped to the spot by the banks, knowing that the strikes would later bruise, with a stunned Thranduil in tow. They had settled among the reeds in the mud to watch the pale birds preen, peck at fish, and take flight. When he tried to speak about what had just happened or the absurdity of what they were doing, she covered his lips with her hand, wincing at the pain in her shoulders. They spent several hours in the sun, saying nothing, just watching the reeds, the herons, the water.

Well, at least she, ever the diligent pupil, was watching them. She was pretty sure Thranduil spent the afternoon watching her.

When she returned that night and uttered a verse about marsh mud and herons and longing that would have made Daeron weep and definitely made her mother nearly scream with frustration (because what proper lady of court composed poetry about river silt?), she felt the pain deep within in her joints.

It had taken nearly a full moon for the soreness to subside.

But now? She was unsure if the pain, the depravity would ever wash away. Not even the Valar would have such power. No sovereignty can they claim here, in these foreign lands not made for mercy.

She vaguely remembered the raid and how she had recklessly run, her grey cloak swirling. The narcotic effects of her memories had worn off, revealing the ragged edge beneath. The blinding fire of the pain, the exhaustion, the heartbreak—not just of him and what they could have been, but the fear of never again seeing the Western shores, of never being able to go home—rushed back into her. Her joints blazed with a fire that rivaled the scorching desert heat. Her muscles, their fibers stretched thin, screamed in protest, jerky lengthenings and contractions, stripped of elven grace, as she ran, or rather, limped now, an uncoordinated ensemble of limbs marionetted by sheer grit. Her chest heaved. Her breath came out in sharp, shallow gasps. A collapsing lung from unsteady ribs?

She staggered.

Don’t stop. Don’t you dare, Tatharel.

Not yet. Not for them.

Behind her, voices cried out. She was a good distance away now from the raid, but the startled shouts of her captors carried over the air. The words spilled in that creole of Rhûnish blended with the eastern tongues.

“The medicine! For His Imperial Majesty! Don’t let the medicine—

Her blood is priceless—” the words faded in the wind.

She turned her head backwards, a cacophonous clicking of vertebra by vertebra. A kaleidoscope of fractured light, blotchy colors, and smudged motion flooded into her view, but the details were blurred. Her elven sight was failing.

Screams in the distance. Bright arcs of steel glinting under the sun. Sprays of crimson onto the desert sand.

Yet, there were no figures approaching her. The skirmish was fading into the horizon behind her.

She licked the corner of her lip. She tasted blood and serum. Her mouth set in a bitter smile, pulling the cracked skin even wider.

So this is the medicine. The eternity. The youth. The beauty. She paused on that last word. A dry rasp escaped her. Beauty. As if she would have that again. Yet, they saw all of those things in her blood, in her flesh, in her marrow. As if by the crudest manner, they could consume the eternity that was not theirs to keep, to contain a piece of elven fëa in a mortal hroa, as if a flame could be wrapped in paper.

She had spent her life creating trade routes, first in Menegroth in the months after Thingol’s death while awaiting Dior’s arrival, then in Sirion, and Amon Lanc, then in the War that ended the Second Age. All her wiles were devoted to herding the movement of goods across mountains, plains, and rivers.

Yet, in the end, she herself had been reduced to a commodity, a vessel, to be bartered and sold, ground and distilled, her worth measured in ounces and pounds.

A fitting end, she thought with grim amusement, that kind that made levity of the world when facing the gallows.

The wind slammed into her from the side.

She stumbled.

She caught herself.

She rose.

A fitting end, but I promised— her lungs burned bright as the air compressed the bruised tissue. myself. That I would live. That I would survive.

But a corner of her mind, fragmenting brilliance, whispered that this was the worst she had ever suffered, that she had never bled this slowly, from so many gashes, in so many places.

She ignored it.

Even though running, half straggling, across the sands felt like dragging her feet across obsidian shards, she continued.

The wind grew stronger now, and it came at her in all directions, keening and howling. Sand and grit sprayed into her eyes, scratching the surface. The sky darkened as the dust obscured the sun. Her mind absently registered sandstorm.

With shaking fingers, she threw the tattered cloak hood over her hair, its jagged edge barely covering her eyes. She ducked her face below the collar of the cloak to shield her nose and mouth. The raw, weeping patches of her skin stuck to the wool collar.

Yet, despite her efforts, the sand flew into her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. She felt the grains pack her nostrils and float down her throat, settling in her lungs. She wheezed, only to draw in more sand. The storm swirled around her as she continued forward, shambling towards a memory of home.

For a moment, the briefest clemency, the shade of the Esgalduin washed over her. The herons called. The mud was cool. She was happy.

Then, the air was too thin, and the image sublimated.

The heat of innumerable suns and the eddies of sand, billowing, cutting, and carving returned. Her vision wavered, as if it could, by sheer willpower, cling onto the visage, that remaining place of softness and light and love within her fëa. Her body was failing, she was not too far lost to deny that. She knew in the rational part of her mind, the cool, logical brilliance, that save for a divine miracle that would not happen, she would not make it to Greenwood. Not like this.

But the gentle, idealistic part of her heart, the dreamer that she had long passed beneath the yoke of duty and necessity, beckoned her westwards. That in this moment of despair, when it felt like the heavens had turned away from her, she had at the very least try.

Even if it took everything she had. Even if others would spurn her for returning as lesser. As un-elven.

As suddenly as it had arisen, the wind died. The sand settled. The air was still.

As if she had come up for breath after a long dive, relief hit her. But so did exhaustion.

Her knee buckled.

She crumpled in the sand, landing hard. A sharp glancing pain laced through her mouth followed by a familiar warm metallic tang. She opened her mouth slightly as the grit mixed with the blood where she had bit her tongue. With what little strength left, she spat out the mixture onto the sands. Little flecks of spittle landed on the edges of her cloak.

She tried to rise, but her thighs and knees remained slack. She rested her cheek against the ground for a moment. Then slowly, achingly slowly, she began to drag herself forward. The hot sands burned and scraped raw, glistening patches on her forearms. Her breath came out in fainter gasps, seeking air in the thinning aether.

As her useless legs slid across the dunes, each inch felt like a year. With every halting slide, the years began to dissolve. The envoy post to Dorwinion. The wedding. Dagorlad. The rebuilding. Amon Lanc. Lindon. Sirion. Doriath. The conversations. The laughter. The grief. The memories. The love. All fading into the blue haze.

She clawed herself forward. Her sharp mind, once so greatly prized—beloved, wavered. Names, titles, achievements, they all fled from her, like baying hounds pursuing a distant quarry. When her arms could no longer carry her forward, she rolled, moved, anything. Anything to return west.

Why try so hard? You already said your goodbyes. Why not die now and save him the trouble?

She stilled. The thought was not cruel; it was true. She had written to him in their shared silver cipher, that she hoped to meet again under different skies. But that was composed when she still had the tempering effect of her mind. But this, this desperate, deranged, wild attempt to return home, was a calling of the body, a calling of her soul, a silver fish, fins quivering, swimming with all its might upstream to return to the river of its birth, no matter how strong the currents or how doomed its fate.

Let not anyone say Tatharel Sûlthiriel did not try to find her way home.

Darkness flickered at the edges of her vision. The periphery blurred into wavy lines, from the heat or the marrow-deep agony, she could not say.

Her body was limp. All her effort was spent. Yet, her fingers, with their split nails, twitched, as if she could haul herself across the vast expanse of the desert and another three hundred leagues west to Greenwood by her fingernails alone.

But she had to. She had to.

On the teetering brink of everything, one final mercy appeared.

There he was again, pale-haired and star-eyed, by the banks of the Esgalduin. He was smiling. The wind lifted a few strands of his hair. Innocent. Before war. Before loss. Before kingship.

The air lingered with the scent of wood anemone and meadowsweet. She tried to speak, but no sound came. A reed rustled.

They were to watch the herons that afternoon, to see how they took flight to the sky. She had to meet him. He was waiting for her. He was waiting and she had to—

Midsummer’s Feast was always a grand and splendid occasion in the Woodland Realm. It was the first festival shared by the Silvans and the Sindar, when Oropher, Thranduil, and their followers first came upon the great wildwoods of Rhovanion early in the Second Age. It featured poetry and song, as was the Sindarin tradition, but also wine and feverish dances by the firelight, as was the Silvan custom.

Unlike the other festivities which took place within grand banquet halls, the Midsummer’s Feast took place in a wooded clearing near the palace. The king and lords were always in attendance, and wooden chairs were set out for them near one edge of the glade. On the opposite side were long tables laden with sweetmeats and honeyed fruits, with glistening pitchers of elderflower and blackberry spirits. In the center, a large bonfire roared, sending sparks that flickered and fizzed into the night sky. Hanging from the branches were lanterns, wrought of glass that a certain diplomat had once acquired from Near Harad at very favorable terms. Unlike the lanterns of Men, wherein the candle wick was of twisted cotton, the core of these lamps contained luminescent fungi of silver-blue or summer blooms that attracted fireflies glowing yellow-green.

The feast marked the height of summer, when Yavanna seemed to promise eternal green and boundless abundance. And it was under these auspices of beauty and forever that Thranduil and Ithildis were wed.

As was proper.

Despite the woods darkening, it was meant to be a joyous occasion. Pairs and groups of elves entered the clearing. The younger elleths donned intricate braids woven with honeysuckles and hyacinths, and some, sheepish and smiling, came into view with their hands clasped in those of equally shy and flustered ellyn.

Even the old, curmudgeonly lords appeared softened. The Silvan Lord Thorondir, ever pragmatic, traded some of his usual sharpness for indulgence as he lifted his grandchild onto his lap. Lord Faeron smiled as he sampled the sparkling spirits, his mind darting back to the memories of his youth in Doriath under starlit skies. A sprig of cornflowers pinned to his tunic, Lord Silor, Warden of the Northern Eaves, conversed with Captain Calenhîr in low tones beneath branches of regal oak.

Yet, despite the warmth and joy, Thranduil felt a chill and stillness. He sat statuesque under the lantern light, only smiling and raising his goblet to receive toasts. The festivities were as they had always been, but for some reason that settled deep within him, a feeling that he could not place, something was different in the world.

Beside him sat Ithildis, temporarily released from house arrest. Her copper hair reflected the deep reds and ambers of the fire, yet there was a stagnancy in her gaze, a dilution in her bearing. She had merely curtsied to greet him and had not looked at him or spoken another word to him thereafter. It suited him, as his mind was occupied with the quiet dread of the scouts’ mission and the fate of his…envoy.

He gazed at the fire pit, where couples were dancing in pairs or circling the flames with clasped hands. A few looked back with curious glances before dropping their gaze in deference. All knew the king did not dance, not even the stately waltzes of the Sindar. Other than at his wedding, he had not danced publicly since he was crowned king. Not after the doomed charge at Dagorlad when the weight of his father’s crown settled on his brows far too early, far too rashly. A brief gust, and the flames soared, reaching towards the heavens, burning through the millennia of grief and guilt.

He had danced once, you know, when the world was younger and kinder. Despite being of a minor woodland noble house in Doriath, Thranduil had never been wanting of dance partners although there was in truth only one dark-haired and green-eyed elleth with a wit too sharp for court and a penchant for heron watching whom he sought after. He could still remember the amusement in her eyes when he had asked her for a dance, and then her yelps and laughter when he, nervous, had stepped all over her toes on every other bar of the music. And if he peered closely enough at the flames, at their bright yellow-white center, he could almost make out the figures sweeping across in a triplet-timed meter.

A sudden whoop drew him from his reverie. He lifted his gaze. The other elves had stopped their feasting, singing, and dancing to look up at the sky. A few streaks of silver flashed across the sky, carving arcs across the dark. Some closed their eyes and bowed their heads, their lips moving in prayer. A billow of awe, joy, and elation rose. An elfling pointed to the marvelous sight. A pair of lovers kissed. A few lifted their voice in song to welcome the divine.

Then, the light grew brighter and brighter until the entire night sky gleamed silver with innumerable stars, falling, tumbling, plummeting from west to east. The darkness of the night melted away, and all that remained was the silver grace of eternity, the sight to which their forefathers first awakened in the twilit mere of Cuivienen.

And for the next period, the time it took to sing a long lay, the sky remained a blazing conflagration of light. Many uttered exclamations of exhilaration. Such a sight had rarely if ever been witnessed, even in the long lifespan of their kind.

Seated next to Thranduil, Lord Faeron murmured, “Elbereth’s blessing…I have never seen anything quite like it.”

Lord Silor’s quiet voice cut in, “Or heaven’s grief. It feels as if…something was taken from this world, and this is the world saying farewell.”

“Bah, Silor, you grow sentimental with each passing season,” Faeron grumbled, although they both knew, just as there was no return to the Sea of Helcar, so too was there no path to recover what had been lost.

Thranduil made no outward acknowledgement of their conversation, but as he gazed at the falling starlight and the return of the primeval night, he could not deny that something had changed. Of what he could not say, but that the axis of the world had tilted ever so slightly. And within the depths of his heart, that part he rarely confronted, he knew not if he had the power to restore its course.

***

Three weeks later, the scouts returned at dawn.

As soon as Tirloth caught sight of the teal palace gates, she bent over and retched a mixture of bile and partially digested berries. Her chest heaving and her strength fleeing her, her knees buckled as she sat, or rather, fell, a few paces from her vomit.

Behind her, Saeroth and Aeglas, sunburnt with raw peeling patches on their foreheads, cheeks, and lips stumbled into view behind her.

The palace guards clad in bronze armor hesitated as they tried to identify the newcomers.

After a long pause, one started, “Halt. No mortals may enter without the king’s leave.”

Saeroth glanced up, his eyes milky and still scratched by the desert sands, and with cracked fingernails, pawed at his limp, greasy hair to reveal his pointed ears.

“Do I…look like a mortal?” he hissed before a fit of wheezing overtook him.

The guards glanced at each other. Then,

“Saeroth?!”

“Is that Aeglas and Tirloth?”

“Notify Captain Calenhîr!”

“And His Majesty! The scouts are back!”

A whirl of commotion surrounded them. Shouted orders. Running feet. Then, Thranduil was at the palace gate, crowned in summer willow and lemon blossoms. His eyes softened for a moment as he took in the scouts’ states, but they quickly turned into frosted glass as he took in three, not four figures.

“Where is she?”

Tirloth merely laughed as she rested her head against the stones of the bridge.

“Where is she?” He repeated, his voice hard and ashen.

Aeglas started, “We, we—” as a bout of cough wracked his body. He tried to clear his chest with his fist, but only worsened the raw scrape on his knuckles.

Saeroth blinked as he tried to clear the nonexistent grit from his eyes. “Desert. It was so hot, so dry,” he mumbled. “Just let me sleep. Just a little while.”

Silor asked, “You pursued her into the desert? Were you not supposed to intercept her prior to desert entry?”

He received only a jumble of syllables in return.

“Healers, then council chamber,” Thranduil ordered and then turned to step back into the palace. The willow branches and lemon blossoms faded into the shadows.

***

When the scouts were bandaged to the best of the healer’s abilities, for what remedy existed on this side of the Sea for the horrors they experienced, Galion escorted them to a meeting chamber. It was a small side chamber, meant to received minor dignitaries or ad hoc colloquia. Indeed, Thranduil had avoided the grand council chamber where her empty sapphire-draped seat stood, wordless, but nevertheless condemning guilt. Nor was it his study, a space where they had spent countless nights together working, discussing, arguing, and perhaps, loving each other. No, it was in this small, sparsely furnished, nearly sterile chamber where Thranduil held audience.

The scouts followed behind Galion, who gestured for them to sit before the king. The steward proceeded to stand behind Thranduil’s right. On one side were Silor and Faeron, esteemed lords of His Majesty’s court, Tatharel’s student and old acquaintance, respectively. On the other side was Celeborn, having recently arrived to court not one week past. The usual gentleness in his silver eyes was gone, and he sat, severe and tall, as austere as the silver trees of a forest long gone that was his namesake.

The scouts sat down quietly, wincing as their joints ached and their worn muscles, unwilling, contracted. A flash of pity laced through Galion’s eyes.

Thranduil made no motion to speak. A chilling quiet, as desolate as winter hoarfrost, settled.

Silor broke the silence. “In your dispatch some twenty days past, you wrote of your objective to pursue the caravan taking Lady Tatharel prior to desert entry. So then, why did you enter the desert?”

Aeglas’s voice came out clipped. The soaked bandages near his jaw quivered. “We did not find her in the steppes. Only wagon tracks and a scrap of what was believed to be her cloak.” At this, he pulled from his tunic the rent piece of grey garment, the mark of an envoy’s cloak. The jagged edges of the fabric brushed against his cracked nails.

Thranduil’s eyes sharpened. The same cloak she wore when she had departed his halls the morning after his wedding. Galion stepped forward to retrieve the cloth before delivering it to His Majesty with both hands. Thranduil’s fingers wrapped around the cloak, the only real proof of her horrific passage eastwards. Expressionless, he closed his eyes. For several moments, the dim light reflected off his lashes, which seemed to almost tremble and glisten. Then, he opened his eyes, ever still, and an even more terrible weight settled in them.

Smooth, Faeron asked, “So you failed to intercept her before her captors took her into the desert. Why not call a mission a failure there and return? Why pursue her into the desert, where you were undersupplied, inexperienced, and exhausted? Why risk your own lives?”

Aeglas took one look at Thranduil. “Because before we left, we promised that we would do our utmost to find her. For her kin. For all the work she has done for the realm, she deserved no less.”

At the mention of kin, Celeborn stirred slightly.

A rasp from Saeroth, who was trying to blink through the medicinal slurry for his scratched eyes. “Yet, a part of all of us died there. In the desert.” A short mirthless laugh. The lords exchanged glances with each other.

“Hmm,” Faeron hummed, “And what did you find in the desert? What of her other guard, Orthelian?”

“A caravan skirmish, half buried under the sand,” Aeglas replied. “We found a guard’s token, likely Orthelian’s, in the sand.” He brought out the bronze token, dented on one edge.

“And the guard?”

“Presumed dead. We found the token in a hand, but the body was buried far too deep and had been there far too long for any sense of meaningful rescue.”

Silor said, “So, it is unclear whether Lady Tatharel was among the…” he trailed off, looking for a delicate word, “lost, or if she had escaped.”

Aeglas merely nodded.

“Wait, Aeglas,” Saeroth’s voice drawled out, as if waking from dreams of dunes and dust, “Did you tell them about—”

“No.”

“But—”

Thranduil’s voice cut in for the first time. “What did you see?”

Saeroth answered, delirious. “There was a—there was a—”

“What. Did. You. See.”

“There was a mirage,” Aeglas supplied. “a grey figure, likely an illusion of the sand and the sky as well as our own delirium, for a heartbeat on a horizon. When we blinked, it disappeared.”

Thranduil’s voice was soft. “And you did not think to pursue?”

“With all due respect, Your Majesty, if we had, even if it were her and not some trick of the desert light, we would have been in no condition to escort her back. Pursuit would have surely killed us.” Aeglas lifted his gaze and met Thranduil’s eyes. In that moment, he was no longer speaking to his king, but to an equal, daring Thranduil to sentence him to a hypothetical death.

Then, the tension broke. The hardness in Thranduil’s eyes disappeared.

Silor continued, “So, you failed to find her, and on your return to Dorwinion, which likely occurred some fourteen days ago, you did not think to send word ahead of your findings?”

At the mention of Dorwinion, Tirloth let out a shrill laugh. “Dorwinion! That accursed place,” she spat, no longer the gentle and perceptive tracker. The cracks at the corners of her lips pulled wider. “It’s disease and death there! All sickness and depravity, where flesh could be bartered for gold, to be used for labor or pleasure.”

“Watch your words, Tirloth!” Galion hissed. “You are in the presence of the king!”

“What does it matter,” she laughed, her eyes manic and bright, “all the falcons were dead anyways, pestilence or sabotage or both!”

Silor asked, “There was a plague among the falcons? That is why you did not send word ahead?”

Aeglas nodded.

Tirloth cocked her head, delirium lacing her expression as her smile broadened even wider, “That reminds me, speaking of buying and selling, did you know, Your Majesty, my lords” she stumbled to give a rough mockery of a curtsy, “there are certain medicines sold in the market squares, medicines brought from the east, said to give the user immortality!”

A dead silence overtook the room. All knew why the eastern delegations from beyond the Last Desert were interested in elves.

Tirloth, in her craze, did not stop. “Maybe that’s why she was taken, she was said to be a worthy gift, for an emperor far away. They’re going to—”

“Stop.” Thranduil’s voice whipped through the air with glacial acuity. His breathing was heavy, and his jaw tightened as his gut recoiled at even contemplating the prospect that she—no, he would not finish that thought. To do so would be to dishonor her and everything she has done.

His next words came out measured, one by one. “I understand that in pursuit of Lady Tatharel, you have witnessed travesties no elf should have to bear, and for that, you have my thanks and pity. Yet, you will not speak of her in such a manner. Others have been exiled for less.”

With a wave of his hands, a pair of guards took Tirloth by the elbows to escort her out of the room. Her delirious half-laugh, half-sob echoed as she was led away. “The medicine! The medicine!”

Silor shook his head. “I fear, despite being a Silvan elf, she will no longer long for these shores.”

Celeborn made no movement to speak, but his eyes darkened to the steel grey of sword blades, sharp and ready to eviscerate.

In the silence, Saeroth’s voice crept in, brittle, like a parchment that had been crumpled one time too many.

“I wish I didn’t come back.”

All eyes turned on him.

“You know, Your Majesty, my lords,” he continued, “so that I wouldn’t have to sit here and explain to you in exquisite detail why we failed.”

He closed his eyes and slumped back into his chair, hissing as he bumped a raw patch against the chair back.

“It would have been easier to just die out there, die a noble death in the sands, in pursuit of Her Ladyship.”

He let out a bitter laugh. “Living is so much harder.”

Thranduil’s eyes misted over, seeing in his mind a dark-haired, green-eyed elleth, bruised and bloodied in the Havens of Sirion or among the war tents of Dagorlad, speaking to him with such conviction that she would not die, that she would not just lie down and let go, that she would live, survive, do whatever it took to see another rose-stained sunrise.

And it was at this memory, the part of light and love that still resided within him, not the horror or the savagery of her current plight, that a tear slipped past his lashes and slid down his cheeks. It pooled at his chin, trembling, before falling onto his robes.

The other lords started. They had never bore witness to their king shed tears, not since he was a prince on the plains of Mordor weeping over his father’s body.

“Indeed,” he breathed out, soft and ethereal, like the dissolving dew. “Living is always harder.”

Saeroth blinked and looked up, surprised.

Thranduil continued. “Yet, she taught me that it was always worth striving for.”

He swept his gaze over the others. He turned to the scouts. “Although you did not bring her back, you pursued her to the depths of the world, into depravity and ruin. For that, you have my gratitude. Should you sail or remain in the woods, you will always have an honored place in my halls. Now go and rest, may your fëar find healing amongst the boughs and glades.”

At the words of dismissal, the scouts nodded and departed, with Saeroth nearly stumbling into the trim before Aeglas steadied him.

Then, Thranduil fixed his gaze on the convened lords. “Without a body or eyewitness, Lady Tatharel cannot be considered dead, only missing. There will be no funeral, no grave. Should she return, she would be displeased to find her own tombstone. Revise her given name to her patronymic Sûlthiriel in the court records, annals, and diplomatic proceedings. That is all.”

Silor and Galion opened their mouths to protest, but Celeborn was faster.

“Thranduil Oropherion,” Celeborn boomed, rising tall and majestic as the silvered beeches of the Forest of Region. “I have suffered this insult against my House and kin for far too long. Is that all you have to say for Tatharel, child of my heart-daughter?”

Thranduil gazed back, no longer the wide-eyed youth of Doriath and a full lord in his own right. “What would you have me do, Lord Celeborn?”

“Ought you not do more for an elleth who has followed you for five thousand turnings of the sun?”

“What would you have me do? Raise my banners and march in open war on Dorwinion and Rhûn, when darkness besets our very borders? To do so would be to act against her final request. Would you have me dishonor her so?”

“Of course she would tell you and me not to march to war for her.”

“Do you not think that I do not know that? Do you not think I do not see an echo of her in every piece of this kingdom?” Thranduil snapped back, his patience wearing thin.

Celeborn’s eyes flashed. “She deserved more. More than,” he gestured in vague motions with his hands, “this.”

Everyone knew the silver lord’s words were layered. She deserved more than this tepid scouting excursion to retrieve her. She deserved more than what this realm gave to her for all her labors. She deserved more than how he treated her, as a companion, an economic and diplomatic advisor, a maybe-lover, but rarely, the elleth who loved herons and lemon blossoms and marsh mud and language and poetry.

“I know,” Thranduil said, his eyes cracked with dark grief, as if he had shed the mantle of kingship and became again the youth who watched the herons call amongst the reeds at her side. “Of everyone, I know. She deserved the world, and it—I—gave her dust.”

Celeborn replied, his voice delivering a sentence passed. “Then, have you considered that by abandoning her, that beneath those foreign eastern skies, her spirit may never find its way back? Do you believe the Valar even have dominion there?”

Thranduil flinched as if struck.

Celeborn’s voice rose. “When Sûlthir boarded that alabaster ship of our Telerin ancestors in Mithlond, I promised him that I would take care of his, and may I remind you, only daughter. And now, when I depart for the West, I will have to inform a father that his daughter may never come home, not even to the Halls of Mandos.”

The Lord of Lothlorien paused, his breath trembling. “In those forgotten corners of the world, not seen by our kind since before the first rising of the Sun and Moon, will she even be woven into Vairë’s tapestry?”

A few moments passed. Then, he said, quiet and with terrible composure, “I am not so petty as to sever the connection between our people, who were of one kin.”

“Yet, let it be known,” his gaze turned to Silor and Faeron, as if they were witnesses, “that a daughter, dearly beloved to the House of Elmo was lost today. And Your Majesty and the Woodland Realm are not wholly non-complicit in this matter.” His demeanor calcified into a mask of imperial propriety, every inch the grand Prince of Doriath.

“I bid Your Majesty a good day. My company will depart in the morning.”

Thranduil nodded, his regal facade crystallizing. “As you wish.”

Celeborn fixed him with another long, contemplative gaze before turning, his brocaded robe flickering in the dim light.

Faeron merely let out a sigh. He gave Thranduil a sympathetic look and departed with Silor, who, was far too composed to express any outward emotion, but the quiet fold of his body betrayed his grief.

Thranduil left the chamber last. As he passed the threshold, a branch of his willow crown caught the chamber wall, broke off, and with it, a few lemon blossoms.

***

He kept a measured pace as he made his way from that sterile chamber, now stained with lifetimes of grief, to his study.

Each pace was slow. Unhurried. Regal.

As befitting of a king.

His steps on the smooth, polished stone floor echoed into the dark recesses of his cavernous halls. The glass lanterns shimmered.

When he reached his study, his fingers curled around the silver handle, and he stepped inside.

As soon as the door closed behind him, he tore off his crown of willow and lemon blossoms, not caring for whether his pale hair snagged on the points. The sharp pain was a welcome reprieve from the anguish burrowing in his chest.

The crown clattered on his desk.

Slowly, as if fate were showing him cruel tenderness, he slumped down against the side of his magnificent desk of oak. His knees gave underneath him, stripped of their tendons and sinew. No strength left to hold him, not in the face of this loss, of this cosmic injustice.

His breath came out in trembles, his lips that she had kissed in another Age quivering in the still evening air. Faster and faster did he draw breath, starving his mind of air, in a futile attempt to convince himself that she was not utterly lost, dropped into the shadowy maws of a land no elf had ever ventured.

Then, the tears fell.

Not that melancholic lone drop he had shed in the council chamber earlier. No, these tears were hot, unforgiving, ugly. Like falling starfire, they spilled from his lashes and streaked down his cheeks without pretense; no illusion that yes, she was really gone.

Yet, within each drop were refracted memories, of long nights under the stars of Beleriand, of the sun-drenched afternoons in Lindon’s gardens, of that weary trek eastward to Rhovanion, of their courtship that bloomed beneath the eaves of Greenwood, of that, of that—

His chest heaved. How could he possibly shed enough tears to contain five thousand years worth of history, of companionship, of love?

How worthless is your love. You wed another,. You sent her east. To her doom. A treacherous voice in his mind whispered.

He recoiled as if struck. The words swam in his mind as they demanded a response. He tried to swallow back the words, jagged as blades, but they pressed against his lips. The waiting, the anxiety, the horror of the past weeks finally caught up to him.

When he spoke at last, it was her name.

“Tatharel,” he called into the emptiness, his voice cracked and raw, devoid of its usual sonorous tenor. He savored the syllables of a name to which he will never again in this life hear a response.

“Why must you go where I cannot follow? I have lost you…and this time I fear I cannot find you again.”

The dead space of his study did not respond.

A cruel yet divinely fair response. For was it not silence that he gave her, when she submitted her talents for language to the kingdom’s service, silence when he held his tongue as his engagement to Ithildis was announced, that same damned silence when she departed for Dorwinion? Was it not proper now then, for him to receive silence in turn?

He shifted. A faint crackle within the folds of his robes. Her letter. Yes, her final letter, written in both dark ink, now blurred, and their silver cipher. The one where she had finally addressed him by name, on the brink of everything.

He clawed at his robes, pawing aside the luxurious folds of embroidered satin. He held the creased parchment in his shaking hands. Enduring like starlight, the silver words glistened in the firelight.

He read it over and over again, as he had done when he had first received it, in that bright afternoon.

Thranduil—if you have ever felt anything for me, written in looping cursive

Yes, yes, his mind chanted, I have felt the world for you.

But it wasn’t enough, was it? A trick of his mind, yet delivered in her voice.

An image of lifeless, green eyes intruded. Her face, eyes unseeing, tongue unspeaking, entombed beneath golden sands.

He staggered upright, pulling himself up by the corner of his desk. Hastily, with a jerky motion utterly lacking of elven grace, he opened a hidden desk compartment, withdrew the lacquered box, and flung open its latches.

The white gems of her house, meant for her own wedding, gleamed. Within their facets, starlight endured: a gift of eternity to him, an eternity she would not share.

The jewels were beautiful, dazzling in their clarity, a contrast against the ugliness of his countenance and the savagery of the circumstances. The white light was searing, whether from their brilliance or his guilt, he could not say. He quickly shut the box.

He replaced the box into the compartment. He hesitated.

Although there would be no public burial, as if he were gently interring his lover, he laid in the compartment her final letter, echoing with the voice of someone who still gave him loyalty even while estranged; the lemon preserves awash with memories of domesticity and love; and finally, the fragment of her grey cloak, the mantle of duty now turned shroud.

With trembling hands wet with unnumbered tears, he closed the drawer.

The objects made no protest.

She never made any protests.

All that remained in the long, unyielding years of the Sun was silence.

In the silence, he could see the pale feathers of the herons as they alighted, hear the weighted cadence of her Iathrim songs for the river marsh, smell the bright fragrance of lemons in Lindon, and feel the sapphire silk of her gown at their first dance.

There were no notes left in this elegy, only echoes, like spent starfall, reverberating fainter and fainter, through the Music.