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Sons of Fellowship  by Conquistadora

The journey continued, day after day, following the western timberline into the far North.  The weather held agreeably for them, and summer seemed reluctant to submit to the first frost.  Gimli suspected Legolas would have sooner taken the long road through the vast reaches of the forest itself, but chose this course for the sake of speed and out of thought for Arod, who was foaled in the open plains and likely would not enjoy longer woodland travel than was necessary.


But when they had passed the midlands and could see the mountains looming misty-grey amid the trees, Legolas did at last turn Arod aside and plunge into the shadows of the wood.  He had become pensive again, with some immediate purpose beyond their common goal.


“What are you up to now, lad?” Gimli asked, a trifle uneasy in being simply carried along for the ride.


“I have set my mind to it, Gimli,” Legolas said firmly.  “For many days I was undecided, but I must find it.”


Lost in his own thoughts, the Elf had apparently forgotten that his companion had no right idea what he was talking about.  Gimli sighed in a huff, resigned to wait and see.


The shadows deepened as they rode further from the sun, the trees thick and oppressive even if the evil had been lifted from them.  The humus disturbed by Arod’s hooves smelled damp and musty, and there was no end of thorns.  It seemed most everything that had grown in Mirkwood had grown thorns somehow.  After an hour, wisps of old cobwebs could be seen clinging to branches above, and though Legolas glanced at them warily, he seemed to sense no lingering danger about them.


It was a ride as trying to Gimli as it was to Arod.  The road was no more, neglected and overgrown, crisscrossed with fallen trees, a strenuous test of both horse and rider.  Occasionally they came across a few strides’ worth of free ground before cavorting over the next obstacle, and after another such tedious hour Arod was beginning to sweat and stamp irritably.  Legolas urged him forward, driven by a purpose neither of the others yet understood.


The air became heavy, and Gimli felt he was beginning to swelter.  “This is still worse than Fangorn!” he muttered to himself, not daring to loose his hold on Legolas lest he be lost at the next leap and twist of the horse beneath them.


And just when he might have believed they would never see the end – for now evening was drawing on – the way widened into a path deep in twilight, hemmed on all sides but clear enough.  Arod heaved a sigh of relief as he tread even ground again, but Gimli felt a lurking uneasiness come upon him now in this realm of shadow, for such a path as this was far from natural, especially considering what a tangle they had just come through.  There was a strange intensity about Legolas, too, that was disquieting. 


It felt very like approaching a graveyard.


Gimli never quite noticed when the path came to an end, but gradually the trees thinned, though most was lost in heavy grey shadow.  Legolas halted Arod and sat unmoving for a moment, and only then did the deathly stillness of the place become apparent, lost in a strange hush.  There was nothing of waking life here, and even the trees seemed languid, as though this wooded valley lay still under some vestige of soporific enchantment which slowed its decay – and suddenly Gimli recognized that Legolas looked now upon his old home.


The Elf dismounted without a word.  Indeed he had seemed to have momentarily forgotten his companion as his eyes searched out landmarks in the dimness.  He seemed sadly disoriented for a time, but then he set off into the shadows.  Still astride, Gimli nudged Arod to follow, hoping his command alone was enough to guide the good beast, for he had no way of enforcing his will save by tugging at his mane.  But Arod did plod after his master, more out of a desire to go there himself than to oblige Gimli.


In the gloom they found him crouched beside what remained of a massive tree, only an ancient and ragged stump that even now fell to dust in his hands.  

“I was born in this tree,” he said, his voice absent as though he remembered how it had been in the days of its flowering, and was grieved to see it brought to this.  “For centuries we lived in its boughs.”


The Mountain had not been Gimli’s first home, but it had stood for several generations before him, and would doubtless stand for many after him.  There was something pitiful then in seeing Legolas, still in the bloom of immortal youth, left to lament a home of his own that had succumbed to ravages he would never know.  Gimli remembered Rivendell, and he endeavored to imagine what Greenwood would have been before its corruption, another haven of bright smiles and fair laughter.  Now it was reduced to a worm-eaten, cobweb-infested haunt for he knew not what.


Glancing around, Legolas rose and followed the traces that marked where the tree had lain as it moldered away into nothing.  At one point he sank again to his knees and ran a hand lightly over the dark leaf mould, searching for something.  At length he dug about until he pulled away all that remained of a plank of varnished wood, in it still embedded a slender elven nail.  Perhaps all that remained of the King’s House.


Leaving it, Legolas stood again and began pacing agitatedly about the premises.  “Here,” he said, throwing the heavy soil away with his foot.  “Here was the walkway.”  And indeed, after a time he had cleared away a portion of what had once been a path of white stone, forgotten now beneath centuries of dirt and decay.  “And here,” he went on, leaving that for a rampant growth of weeds that had spread well beyond their once-appointed confines; “here was the Queen’s garden where she bred her roses.”


Gimli slid heavily from Arod’s back, thankful to have solid ground underfoot again.  Watching Legolas here was deeply unsettling, as though he watched a specter returned to some otherworldly tryst, one who had walked that forgotten path of crumbling flagstones in his youth and remembered when all this ruin had been green.


Legolas turned, wandering for a moment as though he looked for something he did not see.  But the definitive contours could not escape him in the end, and at once he turned his attentions to it, pulling the black dirt away with his own hands.  The object of his efforts Gimli soon recognized as an obelisk of stone as tall as he.  It had fallen long ago, and was now almost buried, but Legolas seemed intent upon unearthing it.


At last he had cleared away the edges and thrust his fingers beneath the point of it.  Silent tears were streaming heedlessly from his clear eyes, and indeed Gimli wondered if Legolas himself was at all aware of them.  With a desperate heave that no mortal could equal, he tore the fallen monument up from its damp resting place, ripping away the roots and other growths that had twined round it, bracing against his shoulder that great deadweight of granite that would have tried the combined strength of at least two young dwarves.  From there he thrust it upright, and though its base was broken and unsteady, the moss and mold below settled to accommodate it.


Lost to the world around him, Legolas ran his fingers over the once-bold engravings which were now dulled with time and lichen, Sindarin runes even Gimli could recognize after a fashion.


O-R-O-PH-E-R


“He is buried here?” he inquired softly, out of respect for what he deemed to be hallowed ground.


“No,” Legolas said, his voice dark with regret.  “Seven years in the Black Land denied him even that simple grace.  His forgotten grave is in the South beside the others who fell beneath his banner.”


Letting his hand drift blindly over the rest of it, that which faintly spelled Aran o Eryn Galen, Legolas felt his regret become something bitter.  “So it is not enough that Sauron should destroy him in the wastes of Mordor,” he spat, “but he would deface even his memory!”

He remembered the heartfelt grief of his father, still a shadow upon him in the early years of Legolas’ childhood, how he had at last accepted that there was no graveside to which to return, and had contented himself with this dedication to his father’s memory.  It was not only rain and wind that had worn upon the inscription, and Legolas lay his own hand now where Thranduil’s had once so often rested.  Thrown down and defiled by Orc claws, the base itself had been shattered, but the rest deliberately left face down in the mould to rot in final insult. 


The mockery was entirely too plain to be missed.


Gimli recognized the dark wrath in Legolas’ eyes, terrifying in its silence.  He remembered what was said of the woodland Elves, more dangerous and less wise.  The long years in the unforgiving environs of Mirkwood had made the ungentle arts of bloodshed a skill to be perfected, though for that they could hardly be blamed.  Gimli did not doubt that Legolas knew and had practiced more grim ways to inflict a fatal blow than he ever would himself.


“Sauron did not destroy the memory of Oropher,” he said gruffly, the best his voice could make of the conflict of condolence and sympathetic indignation.  “Has not the dark tower fallen?  And don’t you still live?  Which is the better monument to his bloodline?”


Gradually Legolas’ anger sobered into something passive, as though in remembering the fall of Mordor he recognized a cold satisfaction for the wrongs accrued by his house.  “You are right, Gimli,” he said at last, leaving the stone to stand alone, unanchored but stable for now.  “And if it should lie within my power, there will be another of these to recall him ere I go perhaps to meet him at last, one that will stand nearer the land that felled him, and that shall not be thrown down so long as Gondor should endure.”






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