Laer o Faen

Na man vedim o sí?

Third Age of Middle Earth - 2840

Lavo nin calya i vad o lin

He lay still and silent like the deepest of pools, his breathing rose and fell with a calm that he had not felt in millennia, notwithstanding the heart-deep sorrow he felt in a bond of empathy with the young elf still in his arms, who had wept herself into an exhausted stupor.

Moving slowly, though he need not have troubled himself to do so for little stirred the precious light that lay with her head pillowed on his shoulder, he reached to run a tender touch through her hair. Fine and soft, it slipped as a sigh through his fingers, the sleeve of his robe against the silk of her dress an echoing exhalation.

"Melethrilen," he whispered on his next outgoing breath, "Na man vedim o sí?"

She murmured softly, wordlessly, and her fingers tightened against his opposite shoulder as though she feared he would let go of her; leave her. He turned his head and pressed the softness of his lips to her troubled brow, maintaining the contact afterward. Breathing her in, and that action realizing his own fear that she might somehow be snatched from his arms once more.

Distant and recent remembrance of such bittersweet need and desperation; healing and harm, each barely held in balance, met and tangled inside of him, and for a moment threatened to drown him.

It was an act of longing and the flaring of a protective instinct so deeply a part of him that it drove the very essence of his soul. He cupped her face and guided her lips to meet with his. The softness of that beginning turned the whole of him into a passion that was as gentle as the softest spring rain, yet as deep as the Sundering Sea itself. Need fuelled the embrace, and he took her mouth with his, deeply, intimately, allowing their shared awakening to drive his actions, and she answered – echoed with unreserved desperation as though she held him as her salvation and without him she would fall. His tongue mapped her mouth, caressing hers; his lips pressed to hers, as he drew her closer and slipped his arms around her to gather her fully against him as he lay her down, following her to hold her, cover her.

She yielded to his towering strength, wrapping her own, still trembling arms around him, beneath his own, clutching the back of his robes as they both quickly became breathless – opening mentally, each to the other, and her emotions flooded him, and overwhelmed, he drew his mouth from hers, only to bathe the whole of her face and the side of her neck, descending in a series of hot, open mouthed kisses, until a sudden, keening sob broke from her and she pulled at the back of his robes.

"Thranduil, don't!" she gasped, and many long moments afterwards, even though he slowed to barely nuzzle at her in an handful of heartbeats, she sobbed, clutching at him again, "Stop, please... I cannot... we cannot..."

Her words unlocked a deeper memory still.

**

The desperate beat of the hooves changed from the dull thud of a heartbeat as the ground underfoot the handful of horses changed from mossy loam to the steel strike of shoe upon rock, and they rode into the barely constructed courtyard of Imladris.

Grooms rushed out to meet them, as bruised and bloodied as the incoming riders, but none touched Thranduil's concern as he threw himself from the saddle, tossed the reins to the nearest elf and with steps that were unseemly in their haste and pulled at each and every bruise and scrape and cut his body wore, he reached an inner garden almost blindly – seeing only her light.

"Celyndailiel..."

His eyes raked over every inch of her, noting the bulge in her bodice where the bandage she wore betrayed that she too had been spared nothing in the desperate flight from Lindon to Hithaeglir. The distance closed as she turned, her face pale; her eyes sunken, her cheek bruised.