Faded Light

(For additional notes and disclaimers, please see top of Chapter 1.)


Chapter Six

Grief


The pain was excruciating, and it had gone on for hours, before he screamed a final time with all that was left of his strength, and fell back on the bed.

But no cry ever came from the child.

Through tear-blurred eyes, as someone reached down to wipe his brow and draw a blanket over him, he looked toward the midwife and got only a quick glimpse of the still bundle in her arms. A tiny, pink Elfling, with a shot of fine, pale hair very like his own, before a cup was pressed to his lips and his baby’s body was taken away.

“He should probably stay off his feet for awhile,” he heard someone saying somewhere, doubtless the unscrupulous healer Arya had hired and who had induced the too-early labor in place of the usual methods.

“I’m not planning on keeping him much on his feet,” returned the brothel keeper’s voice with hateful amusement. “He can have a few days though. He’ll need all his strength to make up the time he’s cost me.

“I’ll send for him the day after tomorrow.”

Both laughed crudely at some other remark and walked away.

He heard the door shut behind the Men and a lock firmly turned, and was left to weep unashamedly with his pain and grief.

Curling in on himself, he turned his face into a pillow, but whatever they had given him was already working, and he was too tired to cry for very long. At least, he told himself, my child is free now. He won’t have to live as a slave.

But the thought did not take away the ache in his heart.

It would have been a boy. He had been sure of it; a prince of Oropher’s line. Instead that line would probably end with himself, a Haradrim slave whore, far from the beloved forests of his home.


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The dream seldom varied.

Thranduil was running down a dark hall in a place he had never seen. Screaming and weeping and other terrible sounds echoed in every room on each side of the corridor.

At last, at the end of the long hallway, he came to a door, wanting more than anything to turn away and not look inside that room ever again.

The door opened, and he stood at the threshold and saw the two figures on a large bed; the one beneath was a young, blond Elf, unhealthily thin and pale. It was a cruel image to look upon; so different from that of his memories, but it was his child. It was his Greenleaf.

At some point Thranduil had fallen to his knees before the vile scene and now found he could not move forward. Having come so close, he could not reach his suffering son.

The youth lay naked beneath a large Man, his wrists bound to the headboard above his head, completely unmoving while the human viciously ravaged him. His dead blue eyes remained fixed on nothing even after the Man had finally finished and left him.

Suddenly, a baby’s cry came from somewhere. The last sound the king would expect to hear in a place like this.

Somehow no longer bound, the figure on the bed got up and picked up the infant from a nearby cradle. Gently he began rocking and humming to it, an ancient Elven lullaby.

Then, at last, Thranduil was suddenly free of whatever had held him in place, and he was able to run to his son.

“Nin hen,” he whispered taking the prince’s face in his hands.

It was then that the youth finally looked up with a tearful look that broke the king’s heart every time.

“Ada,” he begged, “help me. Saes, do not leave me here…”

And it was then that Thranduil woke every single time...



TBC...

Elvish translations:


Faer / Soul

Saes / Please

Adar, Ada / Father, Dad, Daddy

Nin Hen / My child