Hi! Can you talk about the 'Thranduil: A Crown of Silver and Blood' WIP, please?
Certainly! Thank you. So it's actually the same concept that @babybat98 talked about in their post here, about Thranduil being crowned during the Last Alliance after Oropher's doomed charge, and I only have a little bit more of mine than they do of theirs but I'll give you what I have got so far:
Thranduil had never been meant to be a king.
He knelt on the battlefield, knees stained with blood and mud, and oh! how his heart longed for his forest. How his heart longed for his fathers. The first lost so many years ago in the ruin of Doriath and mourned forever; the second a grief too new and raw to yet be understood. None of them had ever been meant to be kings.
Greenwood had had no king when Thranduil and his father arrived with a handful of refugees from Doriath; kings and lords and court were not things the Silvan elves who lived in that great forest had ever bothered to establish. They needed no kings, no lords. They lived a simpler, purer elven life; free of the influence of the Valar and their wars. But war had come to all of Middle-earth, and the Greenwood had chosen to stand with their distant brethren against the Shadow.
Their Sindar asylees had warned their Silvan fellows, when they prepared to march off and join the war, that without a king the High Elves and the Gondorians would look down on the people of the Greenwood; and so they had crowned one, and sent Oropher before the lords of Elves and Men to stand for the woods and the Wood-elves. Lórien had added their banner and force to the Greenwood, rather than pledging allegiance to Gil-galad; the Wood-elves of neither forest were keen to bend the knee to a Noldor. They would fight with them, and with the Men who stood beside them; they would not be ruled by either.
And thus they had chosen a king, so that the noble lords of the Alliance would not discount the Wood-elves' strength, their value and their valor; so that they would look on them not as an uncivilized rabble to be commanded, but rather as equals to respect and fight beside.
Still they had not been seen as equals; still they had been left to fight alone.
And now their king was dead, and so many of their people that Thranduil could not yet bear to count them. Oropher and Amdír both were dead, and more than half their people with them. His fathers were both dead now, and Thranduil knelt in the mud, orphaned and alone.
Tiraran stood before him, his face impassive and his eyes streaming with hurt. He held the thin crown of Greenwood in his one good hand; the other, rotting from both orc-poison and the Black Breath of the Nazgûl he had so bravely stood against, was bound tight against his chest.
It was that wound that had spared him from the dreadful charge across the Dagorlad, that wound which had saved his life when so many of his kin had perished; confined to the Healing Tents, he had not been allowed to join his friend and kin upon that killing field. He should have been there still, but he was as stubborn as any elf of Greenwood; he had demanded to be brought to the field, and he stood now on shaking legs before his dear, dead friend's son and offered him their simple silver crown.
Talk about how that wound is what kept Tirarn from the battle; what kept him alive, when almost all the forces of Greenwood and Lórien alike now lay dead upon this killing field, slain by Sauron's dark minions and by the pride of their allies who proclaimed themselves the leaders of his ill-begotten Alliance. Thranduil knows that Tiraran, too, is wondering if things would have been different if he had not been lying in the Houses of Healing—where he should be, still; but he bade himself be carried to the battlefield for this, and stood now upon trembling legs to crown his king, his dear dead friend's son. If he had been there at the side of Oropher and [LÓRIEN DUDE], would it have made a difference? Would his quiet sense and patience have been enough to quench the blaze of Sindar pride in the face of Noldor ego? Would he have been able to keep his own patience, and argue against the charge? Would he have been able to talk them out of it? If he had been beside his friend, would all those Wood-elves yet live?
Thranduil bowed his head and Tiraran placed the crown upon his head.
It was a thin band of braided silver, three pale moonstones across the brow; three white gems, his father had laughed when he had had it made, to mock the Noldor who had brought this war to them and were too proud to accept the fault of it. The bitter looks of the High Elves who saw the crown, and understood the dark jest behind its design, had set a grim smile on Oropher's face as he walked among them.
But Oropher would walk no more, and now the crown rested on Thranduil's head. It sat there like a brand, burning; he almost fancied that he could smell the smoke of its deadly touch upon his hair, but that was fanciful illusion. The crown did not scorch him, for all that it seemed it should; and here in Mordor, there was naught to smell but blood and the filth of the great Shadow.
Thranduil rose. The crown was light, a thin band; pretty enough in its design, but cheap and plain; hardly a crown by the standards of the Noldor. Thranduil lifted his head. He would bear it proudly nonetheless.
The crown was heavy; it seemed to press him deep into the mud. The crown was heavy, like the unbearable weight of grief; heavy, like his breaking heart.
Upon returning to Greenwood, Thranduil will throw the crown away, never wanting to wear the horrible thing again. He is no longer a king; Greenwood no longer needs a king, so neither he nor his forest have need any longer for the torture of a crown.
When Tarlas gently points out, later, that he's going to need a crown if he's going to act as king for them in matters dealing with the wider world, Thranduil will snarl and refuse to ever touch the thing again. He is a Wood-elf king of a Woodland realm, is he not? Then let him crown himself with leaves and flowers; let him crown himself with his own forest, if he is to be the king of it.
Children—for there were many children born in the years of light after Sauron's fall, and the much-diminished trees rang, briefly, with the silver song of their laughter; Rilaerloth has many friends, when she is young, although she is one of the eldest of them and accepts the role of leader in a big sisterly fashion, just as her father finds himself quickly deemed father to the whole forest. Children braid him flower crowns out of joy, after they see him wearing them when he returns from or finishes speaking with some outside ambassador; it becomes a favorite pastime of the children, and they compete with one another to craft the best, and even make a game of trying to snatch away the crown someone else gave him so that he will wear theirs instead. Thranduil laughs at this, and is glad of it, and ignores the sidelong looks of outsiders at both the game and the lack of jewels and finery upon his brow.. He is a woodland king; the woodland, thus, shall be his crown.
And the children are so happy.
