Wild, Tender Thranduil...
I donβt write the Thranduil that most people write. I write the young, wild, brooding Thranduil who never even entertained the idea that he might someday be a leader, much less a king; who rejected the sociopolitical paradigm of Doriath and went (along with his father) to search for his peace amongst the forests and the scattered Avari tribes in the wild; who would disappear in the forest for weeks until his father sent soldiers to look for him; whose father would always check his arms for freshly-artificed cuts when he was gone a little too long; who would try to do right by ordinary people but, at the same time, chafed under the rigid, elitist, patriarchal structures of his own people and, because of that, always felt like a failure; who fell hopelessly in love with a forest and, purely by accident, one of the quiet forest creatures that lived there; who never wanted to be king and never required her to be queen, or even to marry, because she was a healerβ¦ just a healerβ¦ and after 6 milennia, that was all he ever needed her to be.Β
At the Wedding of Death and Time
by Marisca Pichette
He is robed in leaf litter, his hair
a crown of seeds.
His groomsman pour wine onto their feet...
No invitations were sent and none
received. All guests remembered
when the moss bloomed and seeds
cracked free of their shells --
the wedding was complete.
We shared a single pomegranate,
sweet and bitter soaking our tongues
as they departed into the dark
of a new moon.
We need more gentleness, and less pretense, in this world. β€οΈ
Thranduil pic is from @chicotfp and the dryad pic is from Magic: the Gathering.
