Tolkien OC Week Day 2: Family members
Merilas, Queen of Eryn Galen: The tale too painful to be told
Tell me about her, Legolas demanded that night, once they were both in on their second barrel of Dorwinion and sitting alone by the fire. For what better time was there to demand answers to the one question your father had been avoiding all your life, than when both of you had almost died not too long ago? In these minutes in the dark when they’d been certain, they would not survive this, Thranduil had promised. Tonight, Legolas would not let him off the hook.
His father wordlessly handed him a book he’d brought for this, for first official visit to Cair Andros, after the end of the last crisis in Gondor. Legolas did not understand until he opened it.
One of my advisors has surely kept some paintings of her, Thranduil had said at their last good-bye, and when Legolas realized, he was looking at the last proof besides himself that existed in Eryn Lasgalen, that the realm had, indeed, once had a Queen, Legolas’ hands started to shake.
When he looked up, Thranduil had already left the clearing. Some tales were still too painful to be told, even a whole Age later. But at least his father had finally stopped running, and that was as good a beginning as any.
Your mother was raised in the wilderness of Eryn Galen, by a wandering Silvan tribe, the first picture caption said,and there is no elf alive or dead who ever loved these woods more.
Legolas couldn’t help but remembering all the monsters his father had fought to keep Mirkwood protected all this time and instinctively felt like objecting that assessment. Which was probably why he’d been left alone to read. There were some things his father would not hear from anyone, not even from him.
They named her after the bed of flowers she was born in, another image description said, and there was no place in the palace she was rather in than her rose garden. After she left us, it was never the same. It misses her too much.
Legolas wondered if his father had ever even heard people wondering, if he had ever seen how visitors stared in awe at what little meadows and flowerbeds their home in the mountain was able to sustain, confused by how the King managed to keep so much green and beauty around him alive while dark creatures tried to eat most of his woods.
Merilas was a far better leader to our people than I ever learned to be, it said below an image that must be of his father’s and his mother’s coronation. It was a portrait that Legolas knew from the hallways of his home, only the second half of it must have been cut off thousands of years ago. Now it was finally whole again.
Yet Legolas could think of was his father grieving for his late parents and wife for millennia but never following the chance to reunite with them in the west, not as long as there was still a single elf left in their home who needed the guidance of a functioning government.
Your mother loved you the way I failed to, it said under the first image that Legolas ever saw of himself of the time before he’d come of age, in the arms of a she-elf whose face he’d forgotten.
What he had never forgotten was his father tucking him in every night once Legolas had understood that his mother would never come home, and spending more than one night uncomfortably crouched next to him in bed or on the floor, because holding on to the softness of his father’s hair had been the only thing comforting Legolas enough to sleep.
Your mother could drink anyone under the table, including me, the next page said. But I’ve never seen her drunk in my life. Unlike me, she knew her limits.
Legolas thought of all those nights after his mother had left when he’d found his father lying half-passed out in his wine cellar, and wondered if maybe his mother had simply not been faced with the same burdens before her death that his father had had to bear for two Ages in a row.
There was no one who spoke the language of the animals in our home like your mother, Legolas read. When the darkness came, she saved many creatures we’d already thought lost. She ran with the foxes, sang with the nightingales and rode white deer instead of horses. It became quiet in the woods when she died. They are still looking for her.
Legolas thought about his father teaching him how to ride a moose and accompanying every single of his mounts to their death. About how he had allowed Legolas to have a whole zoo in his chambers when he’d been little because the voices of the woods was the only thing making the loneliness better. Tears were starting to stain the pages of this collection of precious, rare memories he’d been given here.
When we first met, your mother almost put an arrow through my heart because none of us could speak a word of the other’s language. That was when I knew she was the best archer this realm has ever seen and that she was the one I wanted to wed. I wish she could have watched you in the war. She would have been very proud of you.
Legolas wondered if his father actually remembered that it had been him who had shown Legolas most of what he knew about his skill or if these were things Thranduil had simply chosen to forget.
Your mother did not fear death, and that was what took her in the end, his father wrote, and those last words were blurry by an unsteady hand and salt. She was dealt a mortal wound defending the borders of our lands and our people from the aftermath of war. She would not allow any creature of darkness anywhere near you. When we last talked, she asked me to do the same, and yet I have almost lost you to the shadow of the east countless times. Your mother’s legacy is a documentary of my failure. She was everything I never could be. If we ever see her again, I hope that the memories that you two will build will be better.
Legolas closed the book that had just become one of his biggest treasures with a heavy heart. With a new barrel and two glasses under his arm, he went to see where the King had left off to.
The night was still young, and Thranduil’s visit in his settlement had only just begun, but he wasn’t sure if there would even be enough time left before Thranduil would leave these realms, to at least start trying to make him see how very wrong he was.
Still, Legolas had to try at least.
They’d both been running for far too long.
- Tales Untold: SHADOW OF THE DAY (#13) (cut scene)
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
(Tales Untold - a “The Lord of the Rings” series
"Tales Untold" aesthetics | "Tales Untold" glossary)
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
