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Presented without much comment, because I feel oddly hollow for having written it.
Title: The Winter King
Rating: R
Fandom: The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings (bookverse, mostly)
Characters/Pairings: Thranduil, the Wood-Elves of Mirkwood, mention of Legolas
Summary: In the last ages of the world, for the love of his people, there died a winter king. The passing of Thranduil Oropherion, in the winter of the world, long after the last ship has sailed
Wordcount: 3154
Warnings/Notes: Death, rebirth, mixed mythologies, the midwinter sacrifice, killing for love, fading, post-canon
Disclaimer: Very much not mine
Title: The Winter King
Rating: R
Fandom: The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings (bookverse, mostly)
Characters/Pairings: Thranduil, the Wood-Elves of Mirkwood, mention of Legolas
Summary: In the last ages of the world, for the love of his people, there died a winter king. The passing of Thranduil Oropherion, in the winter of the world, long after the last ship has sailed
Wordcount: 3154
Warnings/Notes: Death, rebirth, mixed mythologies, the midwinter sacrifice, killing for love, fading, post-canon
Disclaimer: Very much not mine
The Winter King
"In the Wide World the Wood-Elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People."
---The Hobbit, "Flies and Spiders"
The Winter King
In the deep gloaming of a midwinter forest, long into the last ages of the world, a figure stood still and silent in a starlit clearing. Silver, he was, and red as the blood of winter, his pale hand still and firm upon an oaken staff. At his throat was a white jewel, of the kind he had always loved, and upon his head was a crown, wrought of living wood, through which small hands had woven red leaves and winter berries. The light of stars shone on his hair and in his eyes, but it was not the only light upon him. The light of his spirit burned beneath his skin, seeded from his bones, so that he was made pale and translucent around it. A ghostlight, sown full deeply.
He was fading. There were none who did not know it. At the edges of the clearing, in the shadows of the trees, the last of his people stood, and waited, and mourned, for he was their king and he was fading. They knew it, and were grieved.
"... You need not mourn me yet," he murmured softly, with the fey remnant of a smile. He did not look at them, his eyes yet fixed upon the stars, but the depth of warmth in his voice was still plain. "I am not so strong as once I was, but I am not vanished yet. The draughts of the Onodrim grant me vitality still, that I may bear among you a while longer."
They stirred about him, a whisper like the breath of Aran Einior through the trees. At last, one of them stood forward, an old hunter with his bow, who had known the king since the great wars of the Third Age, and loved him yet.
"They will not bear you forever, my lord," said the hunter gently. "For as long as they can, yes. Bregalad has promised that. As once you bore the wounds of the forest when the darkness in the south had sickened her, so gladly will the forest bear you, for as long as it is able to. But my king ... that cannot be forever. And I fear it will be not much longer at all."
The king turned to him, silver in the starlight, borne up by his oaken staff. The berries shone like beads of blood upon his crown, and he smiled into the lengthening dusk. Not in grief, nor in fear, though there was a sorrow in him. It was love that shone in that smile, great and weary, and some shadow of the young lord that he had once been, fierce and contrary and defiant.
"I know," he said simply, shaking his head for their grief. "When the last ship sailed into the West, bearing the last of my kinsmen, I knew. How could I not? I made my choice regardless, Cúnaer. I have not regretted."
The hunter did not answer for a moment. He stood with shoulders bowed before his king, his bow held strange and distant in one hand. There was a bleakness in his eyes, and beneath it was a loss and a desperation and almost an anger.
"Why?" he asked, soft as crushed snow. "Why stay, my king? It was not what we wished for you. Your kin wait across the Sea. Your son. It was never in our hearts that you forsake them. You carried us through the years of darkness, and brought us a new spring in their wake. We did not ask for more, and never would we have asked for all. You did not have to fade for us. You could have sailed."
"But I could not," the king interrupted, very gently. "You are wrong, Cúnaer. I could not sail, and it was not because of you. When it came to the last, when I stood upon the Grey Shores with Círdan and Celeborn, it was not duty that called me back." He paused, and chuckled a little. "Nor contrariness, either, though I suppose I have given cause to think it. I am an arrogant thing, but even I would not deny the Blessed Realm for pride alone."
"... Then why?" came the quiet question, and it was more than the hunter who hung upon its answer. All about them, in the shadows beyond the clearing's starlit edges, the last elves under the trees awaited the answer of their king. "Why did you stay?"
"For love," he said. He stood at their centre, he stood planted in the earth upon the staff their trees had borne, and he answered with all his heart, that it might be known and that their fears might be laid rest. "I stayed for love, and for grief, for I found I could not bear this parting. I stood on the Sea's edge, Cúnaer. I tasted of its longing. I looked into the West, towards the forests of the Undying Lands, that have no shadows upon them. And then, because I could not help it, I looked behind me. I looked back to the forests of Ennor, to the forests that had offered me all that was dear in my life, these forests fading into twilight, and ... and I could not part from them. I could not bear it."
None answered him. Struck silent, their hearts laid bare before his own, they listened, and were silent. He shook his head, a naked grief and a naked adoration in his eyes, and spread his arms to encompass them, their forest, their world.
"I have known loss," he said, fighting to explain. "I have known pain, and fear, and more darkness than I thought could be survived. I have borne your wounds, and you have borne mine. We have stood together through sickness and shadow and death, with no power to protect ourselves save what strength our spirits could offer and what courage our hearts could provide. From the first, from the moment you welcomed my family, you have been all of my world. You took us when we had nothing, when we fled from a shattered homeland, and you gave us leave to fight for you. You made us kings, and gave us power, and followed us into darkness and death the moment we asked it of you. We failed you, we fought for you, and never in all that time did you falter. Not once. I have known light and love and the joy of my child beneath these trees. I have known fear and rage and death, when all my strength was not enough to preserve us, and somehow despite it we endured. I have known life, marred by sickness and by shadow though it was, and it was never in my power to abandon it. I would have died for you. I would have lived and I would have died, and now ..."
He stopped, and drew a ragged breath, and clenched his hand tight around his staff. He shone. The strength of his spirit shone clear through him, his grief and his passion and his love wearing on the last frail threads of his strength, but he was not finished. He refused it. He was not yet through.
"... Now I would have that still," he said at last, when he had mastered himself once more. When he had dimmed, and struggled, and held. "I would fight and I would die, for death has never been what I feared, but I would do so here. In my Greenwood, in the Wood of Green Leaves. Not there. Not in some sunlit realm that darkness will never touch. My son lives there. He knows its safety and its warmth, and my heart will always know joy because of that, but I can't ... I could not bear to do the same. I have known the greatest of all loves here, in the darkest of hours, because the hour was dark. I knew the light for what it was because the shadows fell so close around it. Can you understand that? If I knew such love in darkness, why should I abandon it simply for the sake of twilight? How could I walk away, how could I sail, when I still had strength to stay, and live, and love that little longer? I could not. I watched my kinsmen sail, on the last of all ships, and in the end ... in the end, I could not follow."
He fell silent, pale and shaking in the starlight, and his people watched him. They watched him crumble, they watched him kneel in the snow beneath the twilight and the trees, a red and silver thing bowed before them of a winter's evening. They watched him, and they wept, bright tears of love and of joy and of sorrow, and it was a brighter treasure than all the jewels and the rings and the mithril in the world. He dug his hands into the snow, into earth and root and ice, and knew beyond all reach of doubt that that was true.
"My king," the hunter said, hushed and wildly grieving, kneeling before him in the same breath. "Oh, my king. But you do not die, my king. Your strength is gone, but you are not dying. You are fading, and you cannot go into the West. You gave up that choice. You will wither until you are nothing, until you are little better than a wraith, and we must watch it. It is not death you have embraced, my king."
The king looked up at him. The mud and snow of the wood had soaked into the cloth about his knees, had stained his fingers where they pressed themselves into the ground. The silver of his hair clung to the tracks of tears across his cheeks. And yet, despite it, he was radiant. Yet he was smiling still, the king in winter, the last of the elven kings, and there was no fear upon his face, only the wild light of a last and defiant spirit.
"I do not care," was all he said, with his heart in his mouth and in his eyes. "I am sorry for it, for your grief, but I do not share it. While I yet had strength this was all that I wanted, and I have had it. Whatever happens now, whatever the price of my love, I will pay it gladly. I am content."
Cúnaer stared at him, through a long and aching stillness, and then, abruptly, he stood. He flung himself to his feet before his king, his grief transmuting within him, becoming as fierce and bright and determined as the elf he faced, and he took his bow into his hand once more. He stood in all his pride before the fallen king, and opened his heart to beg from him once more.
"But we are not," he said, low and fierce, edged in desperation. "We are not content, my king. Not with this. Not to watch you wither. Ask us to die for you, ask us to face fear and darkness and the very ending of the world, but not this! You cannot ask us this!"
The king only gazed at him, blank and helpless where he knelt. He spread his hands, his staff fallen beside him, and in that second they knew the fragility of him. They knew him as he had always been, as stubborn and proud and yet defenceless as had always been his fate. He could fight the inevitable, he could stave it off with all his pride and his strength for no better reason than sheer defiance, but he could not change it, and in the end he knew it. He knew, and so did they.
"There is no other choice," he said, and he meant it gently. He meant it with all his love and his sorrow, for he had been selfish, and he had never meant to hurt them for it. "I am sorry, my friend. Truly, I am, but I can ask nothing else. Not anymore."
"... You can ask me to kill you," his hunter answered, with a great crack in his voice like a heartwood sundering, and his king's head snapped up to face at him. His king stared, his face a picture of naked horror, and in sudden anger Cúnaer strode forward to stand shaking above him, to stand bare in all his pain and his grief and his love. "Ask me to set you free, ask me to send you to the halls of Mandos, ask me to grant you what your own heart could not. Ask me to kill you, my king! Ask me to set an arrow to your heart, to give your body to the forests and let your spirit at last know shelter. Ask it of me! I beg you, I beg you, ask me that. I will grant it, and gladly, if only you would ask."
His king could not answer. Mute, horror-struck, he could only twist his hands in the air in silent denial, only shake his head no, no, never. He could not. Of course he could not.
"You cannot ask for that," he managed at last. "I cannot ask for that. To make a kinslayer of you, to curse you with my blood on your hands ... No! No, I cannot. I will not. Cúnaer, what are you saying?"
Cúnaer calmed. A strangeness came over him, the stillness before arrow's flight, the peace that came only with purpose and with love. In the face of his king's weakness, he found strength, and almost comfort for it.
"I am saying I do not want you to fade," he said, very gently. "You have been our king in war and in peace, in the very darkest of hours and in the very brightest of victories. Your strength has always carried us. But your strength is at an end, my king. You have no more left to give, and for love you have given it anyway. So, for love, I would spare you. I would send to Mandos, to the Blessed Realm, to your son. If for love you could not walk into light by your own strength, then for love I would send you to it by mine, and by the only means still possible. For love of you, I would do that. And for love of me, for the people that you have never yet failed, I would beg that you allow it."
There was silence, then, from even the trees. The forest fell still around them, its song sung into silence to await his answer, and in the midst of it the king closed his eyes. He bowed his head, not in pride but in a profound, stricken humility, and let it fall onto his chest to rest, for a moment, above his heart.
"I wanted to die for you," he whispered softly. "I did not think to make you my killer. Will you ask that of me, in truth? Will you ask me to curse you so, and abandon you to face the fading in my absence?"
"No," his hunter said, and reached out to lay his hand on the king's shoulder, and grip it with all the strength remaining to him. "I would ask you to go ahead of us, my king. I would ask you to go into the light, and gather courage there, and strength to welcome us when after the end of the world we may follow, or to remember us if we cannot. I ask you to carry the heart of the forests to she who made them, and give to her our thanks, and to her Creator above her. I ask you to bear us forward, my king, from winter into spring once more. I ask you ... I ask you to die for us, and to be reborn for us, and to remember us always. I ask you to carry us, my king, and to go where we cannot. You have never failed us. We ask not to be made to fail you."
The king's hand came up, thin and pale and raw with light, and curled slowly and carefully around Cúnaer's. It shook, it shook with all the strength of an endless grief, but it did not falter. It never had, in the face of all death and all despair. It had never faltered before and, to his joy and his sorrow, it did not do so now.
"I will remember you," said the last of the elven kings. "I will remember wood and wound, sacrifice and sorrow, love and joy. I will remember winter, though never again I face it. I will remember my chosen land, though never again I see it. I will remember my ... I will remember my people. Even if never again ... I will remember. I swear to you. Always, I will remember."
The heart broke, quietly and completely, and was lighter for it. They felt it, all of them. They felt the breaking of something that could not be remade, and the joy and the sorrow of its passing, and the still, calm determination in its wake. Cúnaer, with his hand held in the king's, knew love such as he had never felt, and a grief that would never cease. He would fade himself, he knew. The moment this was done. He would grieve, and wither, and fail.
And he would, he knew, do so gladly, and without fear.
"Rise, Thranduil," he whispered hoarsely. "Rise, my king, and make ready. I would not kill you on your knees."
And he stood. Thranduil. King. He stood, with a wild and weary smile, and gathered strength he had never had. He gathered the memory of battles without end and sickness in the trees and determination held in lieu of hope, he gathered love and pain and the memory of his people, and he stood. There in the snow and the starlight beneath the trees. He moved back a pace, stood away from the churned mud of his grief, and found a clean, white place to stand, and to wait, and to die. For their sake, for their asking, for their love.
For his own. Ever, always, for his own.
The arrow pierced him clean, Cúnaer's hand steady and unshaking in the last fulfilment of his love, and it took him through the heart. He staggered, the winter king crowned in red berries, a white jewel at his throat and a red one now darkening his breast, and he fell, shining silver, to lie still and empty upon the snow, and let the last of his light follow an arrow's path beyond the shadow and the sea.
In the last ages of the world, for the love of his people, there died a winter king.
And in the first of the new, there woke a new spring.
"In the Wide World the Wood-Elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People."
---The Hobbit, "Flies and Spiders"
The Winter King
In the deep gloaming of a midwinter forest, long into the last ages of the world, a figure stood still and silent in a starlit clearing. Silver, he was, and red as the blood of winter, his pale hand still and firm upon an oaken staff. At his throat was a white jewel, of the kind he had always loved, and upon his head was a crown, wrought of living wood, through which small hands had woven red leaves and winter berries. The light of stars shone on his hair and in his eyes, but it was not the only light upon him. The light of his spirit burned beneath his skin, seeded from his bones, so that he was made pale and translucent around it. A ghostlight, sown full deeply.
He was fading. There were none who did not know it. At the edges of the clearing, in the shadows of the trees, the last of his people stood, and waited, and mourned, for he was their king and he was fading. They knew it, and were grieved.
"... You need not mourn me yet," he murmured softly, with the fey remnant of a smile. He did not look at them, his eyes yet fixed upon the stars, but the depth of warmth in his voice was still plain. "I am not so strong as once I was, but I am not vanished yet. The draughts of the Onodrim grant me vitality still, that I may bear among you a while longer."
They stirred about him, a whisper like the breath of Aran Einior through the trees. At last, one of them stood forward, an old hunter with his bow, who had known the king since the great wars of the Third Age, and loved him yet.
"They will not bear you forever, my lord," said the hunter gently. "For as long as they can, yes. Bregalad has promised that. As once you bore the wounds of the forest when the darkness in the south had sickened her, so gladly will the forest bear you, for as long as it is able to. But my king ... that cannot be forever. And I fear it will be not much longer at all."
The king turned to him, silver in the starlight, borne up by his oaken staff. The berries shone like beads of blood upon his crown, and he smiled into the lengthening dusk. Not in grief, nor in fear, though there was a sorrow in him. It was love that shone in that smile, great and weary, and some shadow of the young lord that he had once been, fierce and contrary and defiant.
"I know," he said simply, shaking his head for their grief. "When the last ship sailed into the West, bearing the last of my kinsmen, I knew. How could I not? I made my choice regardless, Cúnaer. I have not regretted."
The hunter did not answer for a moment. He stood with shoulders bowed before his king, his bow held strange and distant in one hand. There was a bleakness in his eyes, and beneath it was a loss and a desperation and almost an anger.
"Why?" he asked, soft as crushed snow. "Why stay, my king? It was not what we wished for you. Your kin wait across the Sea. Your son. It was never in our hearts that you forsake them. You carried us through the years of darkness, and brought us a new spring in their wake. We did not ask for more, and never would we have asked for all. You did not have to fade for us. You could have sailed."
"But I could not," the king interrupted, very gently. "You are wrong, Cúnaer. I could not sail, and it was not because of you. When it came to the last, when I stood upon the Grey Shores with Círdan and Celeborn, it was not duty that called me back." He paused, and chuckled a little. "Nor contrariness, either, though I suppose I have given cause to think it. I am an arrogant thing, but even I would not deny the Blessed Realm for pride alone."
"... Then why?" came the quiet question, and it was more than the hunter who hung upon its answer. All about them, in the shadows beyond the clearing's starlit edges, the last elves under the trees awaited the answer of their king. "Why did you stay?"
"For love," he said. He stood at their centre, he stood planted in the earth upon the staff their trees had borne, and he answered with all his heart, that it might be known and that their fears might be laid rest. "I stayed for love, and for grief, for I found I could not bear this parting. I stood on the Sea's edge, Cúnaer. I tasted of its longing. I looked into the West, towards the forests of the Undying Lands, that have no shadows upon them. And then, because I could not help it, I looked behind me. I looked back to the forests of Ennor, to the forests that had offered me all that was dear in my life, these forests fading into twilight, and ... and I could not part from them. I could not bear it."
None answered him. Struck silent, their hearts laid bare before his own, they listened, and were silent. He shook his head, a naked grief and a naked adoration in his eyes, and spread his arms to encompass them, their forest, their world.
"I have known loss," he said, fighting to explain. "I have known pain, and fear, and more darkness than I thought could be survived. I have borne your wounds, and you have borne mine. We have stood together through sickness and shadow and death, with no power to protect ourselves save what strength our spirits could offer and what courage our hearts could provide. From the first, from the moment you welcomed my family, you have been all of my world. You took us when we had nothing, when we fled from a shattered homeland, and you gave us leave to fight for you. You made us kings, and gave us power, and followed us into darkness and death the moment we asked it of you. We failed you, we fought for you, and never in all that time did you falter. Not once. I have known light and love and the joy of my child beneath these trees. I have known fear and rage and death, when all my strength was not enough to preserve us, and somehow despite it we endured. I have known life, marred by sickness and by shadow though it was, and it was never in my power to abandon it. I would have died for you. I would have lived and I would have died, and now ..."
He stopped, and drew a ragged breath, and clenched his hand tight around his staff. He shone. The strength of his spirit shone clear through him, his grief and his passion and his love wearing on the last frail threads of his strength, but he was not finished. He refused it. He was not yet through.
"... Now I would have that still," he said at last, when he had mastered himself once more. When he had dimmed, and struggled, and held. "I would fight and I would die, for death has never been what I feared, but I would do so here. In my Greenwood, in the Wood of Green Leaves. Not there. Not in some sunlit realm that darkness will never touch. My son lives there. He knows its safety and its warmth, and my heart will always know joy because of that, but I can't ... I could not bear to do the same. I have known the greatest of all loves here, in the darkest of hours, because the hour was dark. I knew the light for what it was because the shadows fell so close around it. Can you understand that? If I knew such love in darkness, why should I abandon it simply for the sake of twilight? How could I walk away, how could I sail, when I still had strength to stay, and live, and love that little longer? I could not. I watched my kinsmen sail, on the last of all ships, and in the end ... in the end, I could not follow."
He fell silent, pale and shaking in the starlight, and his people watched him. They watched him crumble, they watched him kneel in the snow beneath the twilight and the trees, a red and silver thing bowed before them of a winter's evening. They watched him, and they wept, bright tears of love and of joy and of sorrow, and it was a brighter treasure than all the jewels and the rings and the mithril in the world. He dug his hands into the snow, into earth and root and ice, and knew beyond all reach of doubt that that was true.
"My king," the hunter said, hushed and wildly grieving, kneeling before him in the same breath. "Oh, my king. But you do not die, my king. Your strength is gone, but you are not dying. You are fading, and you cannot go into the West. You gave up that choice. You will wither until you are nothing, until you are little better than a wraith, and we must watch it. It is not death you have embraced, my king."
The king looked up at him. The mud and snow of the wood had soaked into the cloth about his knees, had stained his fingers where they pressed themselves into the ground. The silver of his hair clung to the tracks of tears across his cheeks. And yet, despite it, he was radiant. Yet he was smiling still, the king in winter, the last of the elven kings, and there was no fear upon his face, only the wild light of a last and defiant spirit.
"I do not care," was all he said, with his heart in his mouth and in his eyes. "I am sorry for it, for your grief, but I do not share it. While I yet had strength this was all that I wanted, and I have had it. Whatever happens now, whatever the price of my love, I will pay it gladly. I am content."
Cúnaer stared at him, through a long and aching stillness, and then, abruptly, he stood. He flung himself to his feet before his king, his grief transmuting within him, becoming as fierce and bright and determined as the elf he faced, and he took his bow into his hand once more. He stood in all his pride before the fallen king, and opened his heart to beg from him once more.
"But we are not," he said, low and fierce, edged in desperation. "We are not content, my king. Not with this. Not to watch you wither. Ask us to die for you, ask us to face fear and darkness and the very ending of the world, but not this! You cannot ask us this!"
The king only gazed at him, blank and helpless where he knelt. He spread his hands, his staff fallen beside him, and in that second they knew the fragility of him. They knew him as he had always been, as stubborn and proud and yet defenceless as had always been his fate. He could fight the inevitable, he could stave it off with all his pride and his strength for no better reason than sheer defiance, but he could not change it, and in the end he knew it. He knew, and so did they.
"There is no other choice," he said, and he meant it gently. He meant it with all his love and his sorrow, for he had been selfish, and he had never meant to hurt them for it. "I am sorry, my friend. Truly, I am, but I can ask nothing else. Not anymore."
"... You can ask me to kill you," his hunter answered, with a great crack in his voice like a heartwood sundering, and his king's head snapped up to face at him. His king stared, his face a picture of naked horror, and in sudden anger Cúnaer strode forward to stand shaking above him, to stand bare in all his pain and his grief and his love. "Ask me to set you free, ask me to send you to the halls of Mandos, ask me to grant you what your own heart could not. Ask me to kill you, my king! Ask me to set an arrow to your heart, to give your body to the forests and let your spirit at last know shelter. Ask it of me! I beg you, I beg you, ask me that. I will grant it, and gladly, if only you would ask."
His king could not answer. Mute, horror-struck, he could only twist his hands in the air in silent denial, only shake his head no, no, never. He could not. Of course he could not.
"You cannot ask for that," he managed at last. "I cannot ask for that. To make a kinslayer of you, to curse you with my blood on your hands ... No! No, I cannot. I will not. Cúnaer, what are you saying?"
Cúnaer calmed. A strangeness came over him, the stillness before arrow's flight, the peace that came only with purpose and with love. In the face of his king's weakness, he found strength, and almost comfort for it.
"I am saying I do not want you to fade," he said, very gently. "You have been our king in war and in peace, in the very darkest of hours and in the very brightest of victories. Your strength has always carried us. But your strength is at an end, my king. You have no more left to give, and for love you have given it anyway. So, for love, I would spare you. I would send to Mandos, to the Blessed Realm, to your son. If for love you could not walk into light by your own strength, then for love I would send you to it by mine, and by the only means still possible. For love of you, I would do that. And for love of me, for the people that you have never yet failed, I would beg that you allow it."
There was silence, then, from even the trees. The forest fell still around them, its song sung into silence to await his answer, and in the midst of it the king closed his eyes. He bowed his head, not in pride but in a profound, stricken humility, and let it fall onto his chest to rest, for a moment, above his heart.
"I wanted to die for you," he whispered softly. "I did not think to make you my killer. Will you ask that of me, in truth? Will you ask me to curse you so, and abandon you to face the fading in my absence?"
"No," his hunter said, and reached out to lay his hand on the king's shoulder, and grip it with all the strength remaining to him. "I would ask you to go ahead of us, my king. I would ask you to go into the light, and gather courage there, and strength to welcome us when after the end of the world we may follow, or to remember us if we cannot. I ask you to carry the heart of the forests to she who made them, and give to her our thanks, and to her Creator above her. I ask you to bear us forward, my king, from winter into spring once more. I ask you ... I ask you to die for us, and to be reborn for us, and to remember us always. I ask you to carry us, my king, and to go where we cannot. You have never failed us. We ask not to be made to fail you."
The king's hand came up, thin and pale and raw with light, and curled slowly and carefully around Cúnaer's. It shook, it shook with all the strength of an endless grief, but it did not falter. It never had, in the face of all death and all despair. It had never faltered before and, to his joy and his sorrow, it did not do so now.
"I will remember you," said the last of the elven kings. "I will remember wood and wound, sacrifice and sorrow, love and joy. I will remember winter, though never again I face it. I will remember my chosen land, though never again I see it. I will remember my ... I will remember my people. Even if never again ... I will remember. I swear to you. Always, I will remember."
The heart broke, quietly and completely, and was lighter for it. They felt it, all of them. They felt the breaking of something that could not be remade, and the joy and the sorrow of its passing, and the still, calm determination in its wake. Cúnaer, with his hand held in the king's, knew love such as he had never felt, and a grief that would never cease. He would fade himself, he knew. The moment this was done. He would grieve, and wither, and fail.
And he would, he knew, do so gladly, and without fear.
"Rise, Thranduil," he whispered hoarsely. "Rise, my king, and make ready. I would not kill you on your knees."
And he stood. Thranduil. King. He stood, with a wild and weary smile, and gathered strength he had never had. He gathered the memory of battles without end and sickness in the trees and determination held in lieu of hope, he gathered love and pain and the memory of his people, and he stood. There in the snow and the starlight beneath the trees. He moved back a pace, stood away from the churned mud of his grief, and found a clean, white place to stand, and to wait, and to die. For their sake, for their asking, for their love.
For his own. Ever, always, for his own.
The arrow pierced him clean, Cúnaer's hand steady and unshaking in the last fulfilment of his love, and it took him through the heart. He staggered, the winter king crowned in red berries, a white jewel at his throat and a red one now darkening his breast, and he fell, shining silver, to lie still and empty upon the snow, and let the last of his light follow an arrow's path beyond the shadow and the sea.
In the last ages of the world, for the love of his people, there died a winter king.
And in the first of the new, there woke a new spring.
