The Prince's Pretend Mother

Sixteenth Entry - Too Widely Met

{_Drusilla_ I'd like to thank you for all your votes recently--they don't go unnoticed!}

Far as we aim our signs to reach,

Far as we often make them reach,

Across the soul-from-soul abyss,

There is an aeon-limit set

Beyond which they are doomed to miss.

Two souls may be too widely met.

That sad-with-distance river beach

"With mortal longing may beseech;

It cannot speak as far as this.

*

One week passed. A week over which we saw neither Tauriel nor Legolas. I did not know if either of them knew yet what Thranduil had done. I believed our king had grievously overstepped his rights, but how could I convince him of that when for the vast majority of our time together I had been telling him what a good king he was? What a good father. Perhaps I should have criticized him more.

Perhaps it had been cruel to everyone for me to have been so kind. But how did one fix a broken king when his crown was still intact? Was there any way to still reach him, or had his grief, his high-minded ideals, dragged him too deep for the sunlight to touch him now?

The second week passed and still no word of the ones I called my children. No word of the dwarves either, but I was far less worried about them. Had I been of my own right mind perhaps the prospect of rousing the dragon would have caused me more strife, but I found I was growing a tunnel-vision of my own; Thranduil was not the only one. He and I simply didn't view the world the same way, and I knew we never had, but I had hoped that perhaps he would not impose his opposing will so harshly against those with whom he disagreed. Legolas had spoken little of Tauriel to me, so if he was more affectionate of her than of others either I had failed to notice or he had succeeded in hiding it. Either way, if his father was right about how Legolas felt, what Thranduil had done to Tauriel would break his heart. It would wrench yet another piece off Thranduil's family. Just because someone was still alive did not mean you had not lost them. Losing their love, in many ways, was far worse-you knew exactly where you stood with them, and how far away you stood from where you wanted to be. To be loathed by one whom you loved-it slowly killed the loving one. How could it not?

The third week drifted by like storm debris in the water. I took to standing on Thranduil's long platform looking out over the lake, ruined Dale and the sleeping mountain.

The fourth week I was about to leave for another quiet supper when I watched something glimmering in gold burst out of the barricaded front gates of Erebor and erupt into the sky with a vengeful roar.

I sprinted out to the hall. "Thranduil!" Whatever our grievances he had to know. A servant and a young lord quickly appeared from opposite ends of the hall. "Find the king," I said urgently. "Send him here immediately. Smaug has awoken. Bring everybody inside and bar the gates."

I did not have the authority to send that order but if the guards were smart they would enact it without needing to be told. I knew Tauriel, Legolas and the various levels of training masters had always encouraged individual intelligence, but fear had a way of warping the mind, making one doubt one's self. A natural instinct it may be, but it caused a lot of unnatural deaths as well. Your body may as well produce its own poison.

Thranduil arrived in less than a minute and joined me at the farthest edge of the platform, expression sharp, taking in every observable detail even from this distance. Less than three minutes after Smaug's eruption from the mountain we heard the warning bells of Lake Town ringing, and then the dark spot of the dragon against the sky began to smolder.