Kingsfoil [Thranduil] LOTR

Embraced

Dear Everyone who has followed Kingsfoil and put up with 60 something chapters, waiting to see how it all would end. 

This is it. 

I'm sorry for the delay in getting this chapter to you.  It was very difficult for me to write for numerous reasons but mostly because I lost someone dear to my heart, someone with whom I wished I could have shared this final chapter.

- . - . -

Nine Hundred Years ago...

"Thranduil."  Her quiet voice at the door to his study pulled him from his reverie.  "Felawen and her husband have decided to sail.  I—"  She broke off the word as his eyes met hers across the room.  "I want to go with them."

"Go with them," he repeated.  "You can't mean that, Elarien.  Legolas—"

She mournfully shook her head, her eyes red-rimmed.  Thranduil rose from his chair and brought her into the room, pulled the door shut behind him. 

"I love him, Thranduil. I do. But I'm not good for him. He—he asked me yesterday what he had done wrong to make his nana sad all the time. Don't you see? Even he knows there's something wrong with me."  She dabbed at her eyes with the long end of her sleeve.

"If you would just tell me how to help you..." Thranduil carefully began.

"It's nothing you can do.  Don't you see? You and Legolas will be better off without me."

Thranduil remembered how her face had lit up when she first held their son and wondered when and how she had become so bitter.  "I know we've had our differences, Elarien, but I care for you. You're my wife."

Her face, once so beautiful to him, seemed gaunt. "I can't, Thranduil.  I can't stay here.  These woods, this forest, the darkness—and I only have to see the dark canopy—even just a glimpse—and my chest tightens, my throat closes up...I can't breathe.  And I feel like my heart may just pound itself out of my chest."  Her eyes were desolate.  "I'm broken." 

"You're not, Elarian.  Whatever this is, the healers—"

"Will give me another calming tonic? Tell me to lie down and rest until it passes?"

"Legolas needs you."

She shook her head forlornly. "He doesn't. He needs a mother who can love him. Take care of him. I'm none of those things.'

Thranduil watched her cry, his heart warring between sympathy and anger. She had already given up.  He patted her on the shoulder and when she leaned into his chest, he held her as long as she needed. He was not ready to let her go.

-  . -  .  -

By the evening, the king's halls buzzed with the excitement Prince Legolas had come home.  From the gate to the cellar, mouths whispered that the prince returned a war hero and the princess was with child.  Surely the prince's homecoming would be celebrated by the king, not to mention the happy news of a new addition to the royal family.  So it was naturally of little surprise when the king's chief of staff sent the kitchen a lavish menu for the evening's meal featuring many of the prince's favorites.   Housekeeping busied themselves airing out the bright, fine table linens and setting the tables with fine greenery and the polishing the candlesticks to a white shine. 

Unfortunately, the same sense of excitement for the evening's festivities did not extend to the king's own chambers. 

Thranduil and Narylfiel dressed in silence until Narylfiel caught a glimpse of her husband's stony expression in her mirror and set her brush down with a snap.