An Unexpected Arrival: Chapter One
It’s another “main character shows up in Mirkwood and has to figure out how to survive”, but this time with my OC Aurelia Castillo and she freaks out first. Have fun laughing at her!
A/N: the bolded text is a different language, text in italics are thoughts
Warnings: lots of cursing
Aurelia Castillo was relaxing during her summer vacation. She was hot, tired, and bored. She had stripped down to a swimsuit with just a long, thin scarf wrapped around her body so that her father didn’t make any comments about her “indecent” appearance when he came home. She had put on Star Trek, but even that was failing to catch and hold her attention right now. She slowly drifted off to sleep.
When she woke up, she was falling. She thought that perhaps she was still asleep, and she was just dreaming, but then she fell through a layer of branches and it stung. She screamed, now completely alert and terrified. More branches, thin ones luckily, slapped against her back and legs, and then she hit the ground, and everything went black.
When she woke up again, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing: giant spiders. So she did what Ron Weasley would do—she cowered and screamed. Their spindly legs shuffled through the leaves, and then they started screaming. There were horrible, wet slicing sounds as if blades were sliding through their bodies, and horrible punching sounds as if arrows were knocking the spiders down.
Swords? Arrows? Who uses those anymore?
Then everything was quiet again, and there were only the soft sounds of footsteps on the ground, coming closer to her. Aurelia slowly peeked up from under her arm and looked around to see several beautiful people armed with bows and all sorts of blades surrounding her. Her head swiveled until she noticed one person kneeling on the ground close to her. He held out a hand to help her up, but Aurelia, being terrified, slapped it away and scrambled back.
“No me toques,” she said angrily.
In her peripheral vision, she saw a few of the other people raise their weapons slightly. One of them muttered something in a strange language. Aurelia examined the man closest to her warily. He looked at her with kind eyes and seemed to understand that she was scared. Then she finally noticed his pointed ears, braided blonde hair, and green garments. Her eyes widened. She recognized these people.
They were Mirkwood elves.
“What the fuck,” she said.
She stared at all of them for a second more before laying back down on the ground and covering herself with her scarf again.
“Absolutely not,” she said, refusing to believe what was right in front of her. “Please kill me, maybe then I’ll wake up.”
All of the elves, including Legolas (for that is who the blonde in front of her was, of course), looked at her as if she had lost her mind. Legolas wasn’t sure what to do.
“I think we need to take you to my father,” he said in the common tongue.
“No, no, that’s okay, just leave me here to die,” Aurelia responded.
“We can’t leave you here, for a number of reasons,” Legolas said.
He gestured to two of his company and they took hold of Aurelia’s arms and pulled her up. She pulled away from them, feeling exposed by her now very inappropriate bathing suit and thin covering. They dragged her with them.
“Don’t touch me!” she said.
One of the soldiers, a red-headed woman, noticed her discomfort and threw a cloak around the young girl’s shoulders. Aurelia gave her a grateful look.
“Here,” the woman said. “Do not worry.”
“Don’t worry?” Aurelia laughed, almost hysterically. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on!”
A few of the soldiers glanced at Legolas uncertainly. They were not used to hearing a female curse so much. But Legolas had noticed something else. He stepped forward and threw back the cloak from Aurelia’s right shoulder and grabbed her arm. He pointed to the brown-ink tattoo on her upper arm.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“A tattoo,” Aurelia answered simply.
“I know it’s a tattoo,” Legolas responded calmly. “What does it mean? Why do you have a dragon tattooed on your arm?”
“It’s not a dragon,” Aurelia said angrily, wrenching her arm away from him and crossing her arms. “And it was for my grandmother.”
“If it’s not a dragon, what is it?”
“It’s a—,” Aurelia started, but she cut herself off.
They don’t know about the Aztecs here.
Aurelia groaned. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t have heard of this before.”
“I have had a very good education.”
Aurelia got frustrated then.
“It means ‘healing and health’, okay? Will you leave me the fuck alone now?” she snapped.
Several of the soldiers tensed, and one even moved forward with a raised hand to strike Aurelia. She saw him coming, though. She turned to him and pointed a finger at him.
“You touch me, I will take that knife on your hip and carve out your genitals with it.”
The soldier was extremely taken aback. He had never heard anyone, woman or man, speak like this to an elf before. But then again, he hadn’t met very many humans. He wasn’t one of the ones who traded with Men regularly. He looked at his prince for guidance, but Legolas simply shrugged and gestured for the man to walk on.
Little did they know that while Aurelia probably would have made good on her threat, she could have healed him immediately. It may have been a bit tricky to reattach the actual appendage, but he would have been fine.
Soon enough they arrived at the home of the elves, and the palace of the king. Aurelia had, at this point, gone limp and refused to walk, so the guards had to carry her. Then they were in the open throne room, and Thranduil was sitting on his throne, with an air of condescension and indifference. When the guards threw Aurelia’s limp body onto the ground, she landed face down and didn’t move.
“Legolas,” he said. “Why have you brought me a corpse?”
“I’m not dead, I’m just in denial,” Aurelia said, her voice muffled by the ground.
Thranduil raised an eyebrow.
“We found this girl in the woods, Father,” Legolas offered. “She was very irate, and it seems like she wants to die. She hasn’t told us who she is or how she got here.”
“I don’t want to die, I just asked you to kill me!” Aurelia spoke up, raising her upper body off the floor. “I thought I was dreaming. But this isn’t a dream; it’s a nightmare. My worst fucking nightmare.”
“Your worst nightmare is to be in Mirkwood, human? Well, that is quite understandable. And very wise of you,” Thranduil purred.
“No, my worst fucking nightmare is to go to sleep and wake up somewhere I’m not supposed to be,” Aurelia said angrily.
“I mean I don’t fucking know how I got here.”
Thranduil turned to Legolas and the Captain of the guard.
“I watched her fall from the sky,” Tauriel, the red-headed elf woman, said. “She fell through the branches, and then was still. I thought she was dead, but when the spiders surrounded her she woke up and screamed. We saved her.”
“She… fell through the branches, you say?” Thranduil said.
He got off his enormous, tall throne and started towards Aurelia. She eyed him warily and slowly started backing away. Thranduil crouched down and in the blink of an eye reached out and grabbed her wrist.
“Yes, your highness,” Tauriel confirmed, bowing her head.
“Then why is there not a mark on her?” Thranduil asked.
He lifted Aurelia’s arm and examined it. He threw back the cloak that covered her and examined her legs as well. As he had said, her skin was completely clear. Aurelia shrank back from the tall, proud king and took her arm back, then wrapped herself in the cloak.
“I hadn’t realized that,” Legolas said, surprised. “I was too focused on her tattoo.”
Tauriel’s eyes widened. She looked at Legolas.
“Her tattoo,” she said in Elvish, her tone urgent. “She said it meant health and healing.”
All of the elves looked at Aurelia. Thranduil stood and glided back to his seat.
“Well then, bold human. It seems you have some magic helping you,” he said.
“It’s in my blood,” Aurelia responded.
Thranduil sat in silence, surprised. His subjects were equally surprised.
“But you are not a witch,” Thranduil said. It wasn’t a question.
“You grow more interesting by the second, human,” Thranduil mused.
“My name is Aurelia,” the girl said, irritated at being addressed by her species.
“What should we do with you?” Thranduil said quietly. “Legolas, has she shown any indication that she is a spy?”
“If she is, she’s a very bad one,” the prince said.
Aurelia wanted to argue that she could be a very good spy if she put her mind to it, but decided that now was not the time for that.
“If you’re not a spy, what are you doing in Mirkwood?” Thranduil asked.
“I don’t know,” Aurelia answered.
“You don’t know,” Thranduil repeated.
“It’s not like I meant to come here!”
“So you just… dropped in and got ambushed by spiders?” Thranduil asked sarcastically.
“Yes. But before that, I actually have no idea how I got here.” She paused, and a realization dawned on her. “Someone brought me here.”
“Hell if I know. But that means there’s a way for me to get back.”
Aurelia’s mind began running a million miles a minute, trying to come up with possibilities. The only person she knew who had even a one in a billion chance of making this happen was Ingram Capello, her friend from New York, the witch she had mentioned. But Ingram wouldn’t do that to her. Maybe it was someone who used the same type of magic as her, who was mad at Ingram or something, and decided to get rid of Aurelia to hurt the New York witch? But who? Ingram didn’t socialize much, and she always said she didn’t know any other witches.
“Back to where?” Thranduil said, interrupting her thoughts.
“The real question is who brought me here, and why Mirkwood?” Aurelia groaned and dropped her face in her hands.
Why couldn’t I have been dropped in the Shire? That place always looks so peaceful and beautiful. And safe, Aurelia thought.
“Where do you come from, girl?”
What was she supposed to say? ‘The real world’? To them, this was the real world.
“Again, my name is Aurelia,” she said instead. Aurelia stood now.
“Until you address me properly, I shall not address you properly,” Thranduil said stiffly, lifting his chin even higher.
He’s going to break his fucking neck, he keeps doing that.
“Wow, petty.” Aurelia rolled her eyes. “And what do you mean, address you properly?”
“I am a king. You must address me as ‘your highness’, and my son as ‘my lord’.” Thranduil gestured to himself and then Legolas.
“But he’s not my lord. You’re not my king, and he’s not my prince.”
Tauriel had to stifle her gasp, like so many others. But Aurelia wasn’t done.
“You’re not even my military commander. Where I come from, we don’t have a king or queen. So excuse me if I seem to hate treating others as my betters simply because they’re pretty.”
A long silence followed Aurelia’s speech. Tauriel was worried for the girl, and Legolas couldn’t decide if he was impressed or offended at her boldness. Aurelia was past the point of caring about the consequences of her words.
“Legolas,” Thranduil said finally. “Put her in a room.”
“She does not seem to be a threat or have any ill intentions. I will revisit her later, and if that seems to change, we can always throw her in a cell then.”
Legolas walked closer to Aurelia.
“Will you walk, or do I have to carry you?”
Aurelia got up angrily, trying to keep the cloak from tangling with her legs.
“I’ll walk,” she said defiantly.
janainaart
baratheonpilled
pixelskylines
dededos
jbbartram-illu
