In honor all those who have served; those who returned safely, those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and to those whose fates we still do not know.

Grief and Remembrance

Thranduil smiled graciously as he dismissed the court to the festivities celebrating the end of the War, and retired from the brilliantly lit throne room.  Using the passage reserved for members of the royal family between the great hall and their private quarters, he nevertheless maintained his mask of pleasure until he had achieved his rooms. 

Dismissing his valet to the celebrations, the Woodland King sank down into a chair before the fire and buried his face in his hands.  He dragged in a deep breath, then allowed himself to release the grief that he'd repressed over the days since he had stood with Celeborn amid the ashes of the southern forest, hearing the song of the Eagles, neither believing at first that the long fight was over.  Tears slipped between his fingers and marked the silk of his ornate robes, and his shoulders shook. 

Too many had been lost over the years of the long defeat, and even more had been slain in the last battle.  Tradition told that they would be reborn in the Blessed Realm, but they would never again walk among the trees of the Greenwood in Middle-earth.  One by one, families had packed up and headed west in the hopes of reunion while hope had dwindled little by little, day by day. 

Now, it seemed, the dreadful deaths would finally cease, but his kingdom was diminished.  Elven memory was long.  No matter how long he lived, he would walk the corridors of his underground palace that echoed lost Menegroth, or among the ancient trees, looking for for faces no longer there, and listening for voices that were now only an echo of memory.  Each soul who had lived under his care had contributed to the realm, and they could never be replaced, only succeeded. 

The candles had guttered low when he finally looked up, drained of tears, but not of resolve.  The fires that the Enemy's forces had set had laid waste to much of the forest south of the mountains.  They would put their efforts into reclaiming the devastation and turn what others had called Mirkwood for so long into Eryn Lasgalen in truth. 

Yes, he nodded to himself; and each sapling lovingly grown and tended would be planted in the name of one who had been lost.  They would flourish, casting seed and nut to expand the forest even further than it had been at any time since the Silvan elves had broken away from the Great Journey to make the vast forest their home. 

The trees and their progeny would remember them long after the last ship sailed West and the last Elf faded.

A/N:  Written for Veterans Day (Remembrance Day), November 11, 2009.  The Battle of Mirkwood may not have had the casualties of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in lost Beleriand, but the numbers of dead must have been terrible for the elven kingdoms which had been steadily diminishing in population since the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.  And I don't think that Thranduil had heard yet whether Legolas had survived beyond Celeborn's last sight of him floating down the Anduin with the Ringbearer and the rest of the Fellowship when this ficlet takes place, making the grieving worse.