The holly branches scratched his hands, but Thranduil barely noticed.  He was much too preoccupied trying to muster up enough yuletide spirit to look forward to the festivities scheduled for that evening.  Surprisingly, the bright colors and the sounds of traditional carols were actually stirring a spark of genuine hope in the depths of his heart.  It had been years since they had celebrated anything in the halls of Menegroth, but now it seemed they might dare hope for some renewal.

The decorating was truly a group effort this year.  The great hall was crowded with individuals of every rank and station just trying to be involved and to find some diversion from the griefs that had prostrated the entire realm.  The dead were buried, Doriath had a new king and queen, and all but the deepest scars of the Dwarvish rape of the city had been repaired or concealed.  The minstrels were glad to finally put away their laments and fill the air with more festive music.   

“I think it is finally long enough,” Galadhmir said with some satisfaction, tying the last holly sprig onto the garland and attaching a hook.  He climbed up the enormous ladder and secured the hook to the chains of the blazing light fixture at the center of the ceiling while Thranduil steadied him from below.  They gathered the remaining length in great loops over their arms and secured the other end to the wall in the same manner.  Several long garlands now radiated out from the center of the room like ribbons from a maypole.  

Many of them were already dressed in their holiday finery, enjoying the chance to wear it again.  Gems glinted everywhere, as though the stardust had been scattered throughout the room.  Thranduil wore his belt studded with large emeralds, and even Galadhmir, though not of a wealthy family, had white crystals sewn onto his collar.  An encouraging enthusiasm was burning like an ember in the heart of the city, and soon the two of them gladly joined their strong voices to the chorus reverberating through the hall.

Wreaths of pine boughs were being woven and hung.  Extra candlesticks were being placed.  The old holiday tapestries were rediscovered and hung along the walls.  King Dior was apparently quite determined to make as fresh a start as possible.

“Even the coronation did not require so much effort,” Galadhmir mused.  They stood back to admire their handiwork over a glass of spiced wine.  “This always was one of my favorite seasons.”

“But you like every season,” Thranduil smiled.

They wandered back through the wide hallways toward the front gates, admiring each room now in full yuletide glory.  The king's young sons Elured and Elurín were running about, trying to be useful but mostly making an amusing distraction of themselves.  Their boundless energy was infectious.

“I need to get out,” Thranduil said at last, longing for the freedom of the woods and the crisp smell of snow.  "I have had my fill of cutting sprigs and tying knots.”

“It can be rather tedious,” Galadhmir admitted, rubbing his worn fingertips before grabbing some nuts for himself.  “But at least wait to eat first.  You know how impatient you can be when you are hungry.”

Thranduil laughed, but could not argue.  “Very well, I can wait.”

The fountains which fed all the cisterns throughout the city continued their lively splashing in the corridor, throwing cold droplets like liquid glass.  Almost everyone was beginning to migrate back toward the great hall now that there were savory smells in the air.  They were all smiling, and there was an air of happiness and contentment about the place that they had not known for some time.

“Come on,” Galadhmir said, elbowing him in the ribs.  “Let's get some food.”

They had scarcely taken three steps before they stopped.  There was a growing sound of shouting behind them.  The nearest musicians faltered as the shouting became screams and frantic orders from the guards to shut the gates.

Without a word, Thranduil and Galadhmir ran back toward the noise.

People were flooding away from the outermost chambers in a panic when they arrived at the gates.  “What is it?” Thranduil demanded of the captain of the guard.

“Fëanorionnath!” he shouted back, barricading the gates with a massive beam.

Thranduil risked a glance out of the nearest arrow slit, and felt the blood drain from his face.  A dreadful black mass of horsemen and infantry were indeed breaking through the tree line and thundering toward the bridge. 

There was no time.

“Arm yourselves!” the captain shouted, waving them away as his archers manned the embrasures.  “The gates will not hold.  Clear the people from the hall!”

The festive atmosphere in the hall had already turned to chaos when they ran back through.  People were screaming, crying, running for their own chambers and calling for their loved ones.  The bravest among them were tearing open the armory closets and throwing swords to whomever would catch them.  A horrible crashing could be heard from the front gates.

Thranduil joined the panicked crowd, scrambling back toward his family’s quarters.  He was near panic himself.  This could not be happening, not again!  He burst through the door of Oropher’s house, stumbling over the threshold. 

“Father!” he called desperately, knowing even as he said it that the place was empty.  He sprinted to his room and grabbed his sword and scabbard from their place on the wall, strapping them to his waist as quickly as his fumbling fingers would allow. 

Fear was pulsing through every vein as he began to realize he may not survive the night.  A bestial horde of Dwarves had been bad enough, but now an army of merciless Kinslayers was beating down the gates.  His stomach turned violently at the thought, and he retched on the carpets before he could stop himself. 

The screaming grew louder and even more frantic as people began trampling each other in their haste to escape.   As much as he wanted to join the stampede of terrified Iathrim headed for the forest, Thranduil scraped up his courage and leapt back against the tide, knowing he had to at least try to defend the city, however hopeless it may be.

Halfway back to the great hall, the corridors were already littered with corpses and slick with garish trails of bloody footprints.   Tapestries were burning where the candles had been knocked against them.  Golodhrim were running in all directions, murdering and pillaging as they went.

Too late, Thranduil saw three bloodied Fëanorian swordsmen leaving a ransacked room as he ran past.  They came after him, and he hesitated only a moment before running desperately in the other direction.  Halfway down the corridor, he turned a corner and skidded behind a huge pillar, drawing his dagger. 

He had only a single moment to swallow his terror, to disassociate himself from the abhorrent thing he was now forced to do.  Then he spun back into the corridor, sinking his blade into the throat of the first Fëanorian bearing down upon him, ducking away as the others stumbled over their stricken comrade.  With another swipe he crippled the second behind the knee.  The third turned on him, but Thranduil pulled him too close for swordplay, slashed the inside of his thigh and threw him back, leaving him to bleed to death.

Smoke was filling the corridor, roiling out of a room engulfed in flames.  Thranduil turned and ran toward the throne room.  There was a cache of weapons there and it would be the most likely place to gather. 

Another soldier leapt after him at the corner, startling him enough that he slipped in the blood and fell hard to the floor.  He rolled and reached up just in time to deflect a jarring blow from the enemy sword with his dagger.  At the same moment, an arrow slammed through a weak point in the Fëanorian’s armor and put him down.

“Thranduil!” shouted Captain Baranlas, nocking another arrow.  Grim despair had hardened his features.  “Fall back to the king’s quarters, my lord!  I shall defend this corridor behind you.”

Thranduil drew his sword and obeyed without question.  He doubted he would see Baranlas again.  Everything seemed lost.

At last, he burst into the throne room.  A dozen arrows were trained on him, and then lowered.  At least a hundred lords, soldiers, scouts and marchwardens were gathered there around Dior and his family.  The king beckoned to him.

“Oropher,” Dior said grimly, “I fear our plight here is more desperate than we expected.  As the nearest kinsmen left to me here, I would ask one last service of you and your son, if it is indeed to be my last.”

“You have but to ask, my lord,” Oropher assured him.  Thranduil was relieved to see both his parents there, and they him, though they might all die yet.

“Take my daughter into the wood,” Dior said.  “Make certain she escapes the ruin of this city and the grasp of the Kinslayers.”

Thranduil glanced around, noticing that Elured and Elurín were missing.  Elwing, a child of only three years, clung desperately to her mother’s neck, eyes wide with terror.

“Go,” Dior insisted, forestalling any protests Oropher may have.  “I will stay to defend what is mine, but my mind would be easier if I knew she was with you.”

“I will defend her with my life, my lord,” Oropher promised, clearly ill at ease with the idea of abandoning his king in the face of the enemy.

A loud, splintering crash echoed through the hall as the doors were assaulted from the other side.

“Go now,” the king commanded them. “before they breach!  I would not have them follow you.”  The queen and the princess exchanged one last grasping farewell before Oropher pulled Elwing away with him.  The doors gave way and a crowd of Golodhrim spilled into the hall, two grim lords at their head.  Oropher, Lóriel, Thranduil, and two of the royal guards ducked out of the room with the princess under the first hail of arrows.

They ran as quickly as they could for the south gates.  Maimed and dismembered bodies lay strewn over the floor, men and women alike.   Some individual Fëanorians gave chase, but gave up when the fleeing Iathrim failed to engage them, enticed by easier plunder. 

A thunderous command echoed through the corridor behind them, attracting the immediate attention of all the Golodhrim in the area.  Thranduil looked back and saw a huge captain, a diadem on his brow, pointing them out.  At once, three warriors came after them, bloodied blades drawn.

It was clear these pursuers would not be easily shed, and Thranduil grabbed one of their two guards, intending to engage them.  Oropher spared one agonized glance back, understanding Thranduil’s plan but hating to leave him.  Side by side, Thranduil and the guardsman turned and braced themselves in the corridor, blades up.

The three Fëanorians fell upon them in a vicious attack.  Thranduil parried several shattering blows before slinging the other’s blade aside and thrusting upward beneath the chin.  Blood spewed from the Golodh’s mouth, and in that moment of disorientation Thranduil wrenched his blade out of his opponent's palate, kicked him down and dealt a death blow to the throat.  Beside him, the guardsman sank to his knees over the body of the second Golodh, clutching a mortal wound.  The third thrust his sword through the guardsman’s chest just as Thranduil’s blade came down hard on his neck.

Standing in the ruin, Thranduil had only a moment to look up and see the captain bearing down on him in a murderous rage.  He stumbled backward, lifting his blade just quickly enough to absorb the hacking onslaught loosed against him.  The vehemence of the attack forced him to give ground, ducking out of the way as the sweeping strikes of the Golodhrin sword knocked chips out of the wall.

The bloodstained captain pressed his advantage with a brutal artlessness that mirrored the contempt on his face.  Thranduil could feel the ache in his arms as his enemy pounded away at his sword as if to cleave him in two.  Then he fell backwards over a corpse and froze as steel touched his throat.

The Golodh leaned in, twisting his blade under Thranduil’s chin hard enough to draw blood, but hesitating to thrust it deeper.  He was close enough now that Thranduil could read the runes on the medallion he wore.

Carnistir.

“Where is it?” Caranthir demanded in a heavily accented voice.  “Where is the jewel?  Do they have it?”  He nodded in the direction Oropher had fled.

Thranduil threw himself to the side, and what should have been a fatal strike glanced instead through his shoulder.  He lunged toward an open door, but a blow from Caranthir's armored fist knocked him down again.  Stunned, Thranduil scrambled through the door and to his feet.  He turned and raised his blade, its once burnished edges beaten ragged by the superior Golodhrin steel.  Caranthir surged forward and swept the sword aside with his own, catching the ragged edge and twisting it out of Thranduil’s hands.

In that blinding instant, Thranduil realized he would die on that sword unless he acted.  The desperate will to live burned through whatever fear paralyzed him, and he leapt at Caranthir’s face like a savage.  His hand clenched in the mane of dark hair, his legs encircling the armored waist as he plunged his dagger to the hilt into Caranthir’s neck.

The Fëanorion fell backward in a heap, his hands grasping at Thranduil’s wrists, a horrible surprise in his fading eyes.  Thranduil pulled out his blade and slit Caranthir’s throat as he would a wounded stag.  The lifeblood flowed out of him alarmingly fast, driven by a powerful and frantic heartbeat that soon stilled.

Thranduil staggered to his feet, shaken and disgusted by it all.  He had to get out.  He was not even supposed to be here.  He glanced around, and suddenly realized he was in Galadhmir’s house.  The body he had fallen over outside was Dorlas, and not far away lay the lifeless form of his wife.  The place had been ransacked, but Galadhmir’s parents had not been wealthy enough to own anything that would catch a Golodh’s eye.  However, one closet was suspiciously closed.

Knowing he had only moments to spare, Thranduil lay a hand on the door handle and heard a terrified sob.  “Lindóriel?” he called.  He opened the door and found her crouched and cringing there, Galadhmir’s younger sister, a kitchen knife in her hands.  They shared the same look of exhausted relief at the sight of one another.

“We must go,” he said, pulling her up.  Then he hesitated.  He grabbed a satchel from the closet.  “Pack whatever food you have!” he instructed.  As she rushed to the larder, Thranduil also helped himself to Dorlas’ winter cloak.  He paused for a moment, then shed his sword belt and scabbard.  His own sword was ruined.  Quickly, he pulled Caranthir’s belt off the body and tried it on for size.  It was serviceable enough.  He retrieved and sheathed the Golodhrin sword.  Then he took the diadem as well, and his medallion, and his ring.

Lindóriel had reappeared with the satchel.  Thranduil shoved the jewels deep inside it and gave her cloak to her.  She was still pulling it on as he hurried her out the door.

“Do not look,” he instructed her as they stepped over her father’s body.  He took her hand and together they sprinted for the city gates. 

Galadhmir nearly collided with them as the corridors came together.  Thranduil pulled him in without a word, and the three of them made a last desperate break for the gates ahead, open to the cold dark of the night.

Angry voices shouted after them, but they did not wait to be accosted.  They hit the crusted snow with all the speed they could manage and plunged into the darkness.

Snow was falling in great silent flurries.  Thranduil led them toward the southern border, knowing that was the direction his father had been heading when they were separated.  He avoided the main road, racing headlong down a hunter’s trail he knew well even in darkness.

At long last they slowed, hearing no sounds of pursuit.  It was bitterly cold, and the woods were silent.  The only hint of the horror they had fled was the smell of acrid smoke as Menegroth burned far behind them. 

As the nervous tension at last drained from his body, Thranduil began to tremble violently.  The shock and grief he had not had time to feel until now threatened to overwhelm him.  There was elvish blood on his hands, on his clothes, in his hair.  He retched again into the snow, though he had nothing left in him, barely hearing Lindóriel sobbing into her brother’s arms.

Galadhmir groaned mournfully, a keening note that sounded in the stillness as though his heart would break.  Distantly, it seemed they could hear others lifting their cries of woe into the night as well, the broken voices of Doriath.