The Secret of the Forest

12 - Gone

It took several days for the realisation to sink in that Thranduil was indeed gone. At first Anna was in denial and pretended that he was still there, just somehow out of sight, and she tried to uphold her normal daily routine. But day by day it was harder to actually fool herself and she had to accept her own folly. The king was gone and with him almost half of the population of the palace and the Woodland Realm. Besides Thranduil himself, Legolas and Tauriel, who had been away for several weeks already, she missed Faeldir and Amardir the most, after all they had been the sweetest and most charming companions for countless afternoons. She had not even had a chance to say good bye to them, which made their absence even more aggrieving. What if they never returned? She carried their poem with her wherever she went, a crumpled piece of paper in the depths of her pocket, just like she did with Thranduil's cloth. The halls were eerily quiet and the few voices that remained were hushed and rather subdued as the days dragged on with no news from the Mountain. Although she assumed that at least no news meant good news and that Thranduil was still alive, but the uncertainty was slowly but steadily draining her emotionally.

Countless times her feet carried her up to the same gallery where she had watched Thranduil bid her farewell, reliving this last moment over and over again and always hoping for the gates to be pulled open and on a wave of bright light seeing the figure of Thranduil return in victory. But the gates remained shut and no light and no king were anywhere in sight.

Miserable was how she felt, as if her heart had been torn out and replaced by an empty shell that still kept her alive but had no life in it. She barely slept and skipped food more than once and if Brethilwen had not insisted that she get up and eat she would have spent her days in bed waiting for doom to befall.

A shadow crept into the emptiness of her heart, sneaking in like a stealthy thief and settling inside with the poison of doubt. First it was just a small voice in the back of her head, scolding her for being a fool and having stayed behind, when she really should have ignored all orders and simply sneaked somehow into Thranduil's army. Although it was totally unclear to her how on earth she should have managed that. But the voice steadily raised its volume and kept insisting that she would not see Thranduil again if she just stayed in Mirkwood and waited for him like she had promised.

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The fact that she had now so little distraction from her dark thoughts did not help in lifting her spirit. On the contrary, it rather encouraged her dwelling on all the possible heart-wrenching scenarios her mind could come up with. She had become an expert in picturing Thranduil's violent death in all its mind-boggling variations. Images of fierce battles and deadly combat tortured her head and always, always there was the moment when she saw Thranduil being pierced by one of the orc's filthy scimitars, his limp body being pulled down without mercy from his elk and dragged through the muddy battleground by those evil creatures and then —, then she forced her mind to stop. She refused to think the unthinkable, she would not allow this to happen. That is what she told herself. And for a while it worked, but not for long. Her imagination was her worst enemy after all. She had no experience in wars of any kind but she had read enough depressing recollections in the library to have a quite clear idea of the merciless slaughter that was war. Death took, regardless of age or status, Men, Dwarves and even Elves. After all that had been the fate of Oropher and Thranduil must have known very well the danger he was walking into.