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Sons of Fellowship  by Conquistadora

Together Legolas and Gimli returned to the royal encampment to rejoin the others.  The afternoon was waning fast, and already could be caught the wafting scent of dinner in preparation, the pavilions erected once again for their brief stay.  Their party grew ever smaller.


Merry and Pippin in full noble array broke off a game of fencing when they noticed their two mismatched companions returning to the grounds. 


“Gimli! Legolas!” they called laughingly, sheathing their blades, rushing to meet them and running a circle around them like a couple of overgrown children.  “We knew you wouldn’t miss dinner! What kept you? We were starting to think you might have lost yourselves!”


“Hobbits are so dratted boisterous,” Gimli grumbled good-naturedly.


“I would have it no other way,” said Legolas with a smile, snatching Pippin by the shoulders and swinging him round to roughhouse with him in turn, still rejoicing in his return to daylight.  “There is too little youth among the Elves in these days!” 


Pippin squealed and jostled about wildly, but could not escape Legolas’ brief flare of boyish exuberance, laughing freely with him.  In that Gimli was granted a passing glimpse of what Legolas must have been like in his younger days, bright and carefree, before he had earned that pensive air that came with immortal years.  For a moment Gimli thought it would break his heart to see him fall again into his deep and thoughtful ways when the mood had passed, a sudden sentiment that surprised even himself.  Perhaps all this Elvish company was beginning to have more of an effect on him than he had realized.


Pippin shrieked, choking on his laughter, his knees threatening to buckle though he struggled as he might.  “Merry!”


“Ah, nothing doing, Pip,” Merry said, with a lopsided grin, as his cousin writhed in vain.  “You’ll be taken to the Elvenking yet.  Ah!” he yowled, as unseen hands took him by the throat as well.


“Look, Legolas!” Aragorn laughed heartily.  “I have caught one, too!  I never expected to see you Halfling hunting.  In point of fact, I doubted whether I would see you again for a long while!  These will tell you, I threatened even to go in after you if you returned not by sundown.  Were the caverns of Glæmscrafu as spellbinding as all that?”


“Only Gimli can find fit words to speak of them,” Legolas said, sobering somewhat and releasing Pippin at last.  “And never before has a Dwarf claimed a victory over an Elf in a contest of words.  Now therefore let us go to Fangorn and set the score right!”


“If you can make Gimli see wonder in Fangorn, Legolas, it will be accounted a marvel among both your kindreds,” Aragorn smiled.


They wandered back through the small but elaborate tent city, Gimli and the hobbits accompanying Aragorn while Legolas excused himself to see to Arod.  After a search he found him picketed behind the silvery abode of the Lord and Lady of Lórien, which surprised him until he remembered Celeborn’s fondness for horses.


“Arod,” he scolded him lightly, stroking the proud face as the other nickered and squealed softly in equine affection, bumping him with a velvet nose, “have you been making a nuisance of yourself, my beautiful?”  He had left him to wander free, but apparently the stallion had eventually merited picketing with the others of his kind.  Goodness knows what mischief he had been up to.


“He is a lovely thing,” came a smooth and low voice, and Legolas turned to see Lady Galadriel herself approach silently from the other side, radiant as always in her snow-white gown, with girdle of golden leaves.


"My Lady," Legolas addressed her courteously, lowering his gaze for a moment.


She smiled softly.  “So like your father,” she mused, “and yet so unlike.  When I met again with Aran Thranduil he was courteous but would have no part with me, as is his privilege if he so desires.  And perhaps it is best of him.  I command not his fealty, nor yours, though you give it freely.”


“Such is my nature, my Lady.”  Legolas said nothing of it, but had noticed a change in her since the Ring War.  He almost hesitated to make the comparison, but she reminded him of his father after Gollum had escaped their custody, shaken in confidence, old pride humbled as she was made to face her shortfalls.  She still wore the Ring Nenya, but it was powerless now, an empty remembrance of a past age.  “What is your command?”


She smiled again, a smile that reached her eyes, leading Legolas to believe the loss of Nenya was perhaps a mixed blessing.  “I have no command for you, Legolas,” she said, “but only a request.  Walk with me, if you will, before the evening falls.  I would see these renowned battlements ere I go, and you I would have as my escort, who fought here with valor equal your sires of old.”


Legolas bowed in free consent, for he would never refuse such a simple request as that.


They left the encampment and he led her up the causeway toward Helm’s Deep.  He felt rather insignificant beside her, but she seemed to enjoy his company in her own way.  


There was still a small garrison stationed at the fortress, together with a few families of Rohirrim displaced from destroyed villages, and it seemed strange after all that had passed there to hear the stones of the Hornburg echo with the laughter of children. 


To pass the gates Legolas needed only a word and a smile, for the men of Erkenbrand remembered him well.  They hushed in the presence of the Lady, but if such was the Sorceress of the Wood, she did not seem especially threatening now even if they still did not trust her.


Continuing past the guards, they found themselves in the path of a spirited game of tag, a happily disheveled little girl running headlong into Legolas’ arms before he righted her and sent her on her way as her brother rounded the bend.  The Elves earned second glances from both of them, but their young smiles went undimmed.


Galadriel smiled as well, but with a melancholy air.  “So you almost seem to me,” she said.  “You may no longer hold yourself to be young, but your heart is still a thing of beauty to my eyes.”


Legolas said nothing, uncertain how to reply.






They stood together on the Deeping Wall, overlooking the battle plain, beside them the rubble-strewn breach blown into the masonry by Saruman’s minions, the perilous edges shored up by the Rohirrim with planks. 


Galadriel gazed out over the open field, from the place where brave men had fallen and died, and in her mind’s eye she could see the massive armies that had trod there but months ago.  And from there she felt the weariness come upon her again, her years in Middle-earth spent, as though the whole of the world wished only to sigh and then be still.  It was time at last to let go her pride.  But even now she welcomed humble passage into the West over the dominion and ruin of all the world that had been offered her in the One Ring.


With an almost imperceptible sigh of resignation, she glanced aside at her companion.  He suffered no such quandary, his eyes clear and unclouded by duplicity, guile, or pride, the downfall of the Noldor.  Others would have shied away from her probing gaze, or closed their minds against her as best they could, but Legolas had nothing on his soul that he would hide, and what faults were his he freely admitted.  His innocence had been destroyed long ago, but his integrity remained.


At first glance there would seem to be nothing to draw them together, much less warrant her admiration, she a Princess of the Noldorin Calaquendi of Valinor, Artanis Nerwen Altáriel Finarphiriel, kinswoman to the High King, named the Greatest and Fairest among the Eldar; and he a Wood-elf, bearing a name of silvan dialect, raised in the forests of the North among the lesser kindreds of the eastern middle-lands.  But to look deeper, as she did, would be to see in Legolas a Prince of the Eldar indeed, scion of one of the noblest bloodlines of ancient Doriath, heir to the North, and indeed her kinsman through the blood of his grandsire Oropher her cousin, from opposite sides of the royal house of Elu Thingol.


She lay a slender hand to the stone of the ramparts.  Even so did she feel herself: roughened by time, cold and hardened, but now warmed by the new sun, her power crumbling in certain places but shored up by the love of her husband and the call of her kin, though both were a strain to her.


“It is over,” she said at last, her words carrying many meanings.  The war was over, the Age of the Rings had passed, but in that was the undoing of all she had wrought, the end of many things both foul and fair.  But no more would the threat and temptation of dominion haunt her steps.  “I shall diminish,” she said again, “and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.  I could have taken the Ring and did not, could have done evil and would not.  Tell me, son of Thranduil: long you journeyed in Its shadow, as guard and guide, a trial I could not have borne.  Had it no power to tempt you?”


Legolas was silent for a moment, remembering the long and wakeful nights among the Fellowship, the chilling call of that which Frodo had carried when he alone was there to hear.


“Yes,” he said at last, in complete honesty.  “I paid it little heed at first, but when all was still it would make advances toward me.”  It was an unpleasant but very vivid memory.  “It offered dominion of all the woodlands of Middle-earth, the power to heal their hurts and bend them to my own will.  But such was not my desire, and so I scorned it.”


“The whispers of the One would not be so easily thrust aside,” Galadriel said, remembering its call to her.  “Did its voice not change?”


“It did,” Legolas said, a distant look in his eyes.  “When I would take it not for myself, it reviled me for leaving my father alone to die when near at hand lay the power that could be his salvation.  It mocked me for trusting to the strength of a Halfling, for sending him to his ruin and to the ruin of us all.”


“Such accusations would be difficult to ignore.”


“Yes.  But they were lies.” 


The sun had begun sinking toward the horizon yet again, bathing the countryside in a rich golden orange glow before twilight.  From the Deeping Wall the view was spectacular, the last of the sunbeams spilling over the mountain peaks.


“The lies of the Enemy were often baited with truth,” she said, “to sweeten their appeal.”


“No semblance of truth could have induced me to return the Ring to Lasgalen,” Legolas insisted.  “No victory it could have offered would have been worth the ruinous price.  I would sooner have my father die unbowed than see him corrupted from within.”


The golden orange sunset had given over now to blue twilight, and the pale elvish lamps again lit the plain like a dream.  The pavilions were softly aglow from within, lights bobbing about in elvish hands as traffic through the encampment continued unabated as dinner was prepared amid glad laughter and Sindarin chatter.


“Lord Thranduil may not have all the refinement of the Eldar of the West,” Galadriel said at last, “but as a father of princes I may say he has been seldom surpassed.”


“Would you have me tell him so, my Lady?”


“If you wish,” she said.  “But come; the board is laden, and I would not keep Master Gimli waiting.”







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