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A single, mournful horn pierced the stillness, its cry echoing through the darkening trees. It wasn’t a call to arms nor a summons for battle. It was the stark, undeniable signal that she had been found.
The soft thunder of hooves announced Thranduil’s arrival long before they saw him. His silver armor glinted in the waning light, his face an unreadable mask, a king who believed he still had something left to protect. He dismounted fluidly, commanding the silence.
“Where is she?”
Silence answered him. How does one speak when words themselves carry death?
Finally, the guard who found her forced himself forward, his voice a broken whisper: “This way, my lord.”
The path he took Thranduil down was mercilessly familiar: blood staining the leaves, the earth torn and wounded as though it too had suffered with her. Thranduil’s steps faltered, the careful control he wore splintering with each grim detail. He reached the cliff’s edge, the ground disappearing before him in an endless descent. The wind, sharp with pine and earth, carried the scent of something far more dreadful: blood and death.
He looked down, and all at once, his world fractured.
Elenariel lay broken upon the rocks below, her body twisted cruelly by fate’s violent hand. Her cloak fanned around her like a wilted flower - dark hair, a spill of ink against the stone. Beside her, cradled in an open palm, rested the Silmaril - its light extinguished, as lifeless as she was now.
Thranduil’s breath seized, his heart thrashing against the cage of his ribs. The king who stood indomitable through countless battles now swayed at the precipice of an abyss far deeper than any before. His lips moved soundlessly, eyes wide, uncomprehending, as the reality settled upon him.
In that moment, the last vestige of hope slipped from his grasp, splintering whatever illusions had kept him whole.
He fell to his knees with a sound so broken it barely resembled his own voice. A visceral cry tearing free, raw and devastating, resonating through the silent forest. It was grief in its purest form, profound and merciless - the sound of a man utterly shattered.
The trees quivered, the wind held its breath, and even the world seemed to recoil at his suffering. His warriors watched, paralyzed by the raw anguish of their king, unable to mend what had irreparably broken.
And there, at the edge of everything he’d ever known, Thranduil felt the last of his strength drain away. His fingers clawed uselessly at the earth, as if seeking an anchor in a world where none remained.
Elenariel was gone, and nothing - not time, nor crown, nor power - would ever bring her back.
As darkness claimed the horizon, the King of the Woodland Realm shattered completely, mourning not only the loss of the woman he loved but also the irrevocable breaking of his own soul.
And yet, even in the ruin of himself, something pulled him forward.
Not hope - hope had long since bled dry.
But duty. Love. The cruel need to see with his own eyes what his heart already knew.
He rose to his feet as though dragged by some grim compulsion, each movement weighted by the slow death of his former self. At the cliff’s rim, the wind howled in a hollow dirge, whipping strands of his pale hair across eyes that stared down at the broken form below.
Unthinking, nearly unfeeling, he began his descent. An unsteady, torturous journey down a path carved by time and cruelty. The stones underfoot crumbled as if recoiling from his touch. Sharp branches clawed at his cloak like desperate hands, but he felt nothing but the cold press of emptiness where his heart had once beat.
When he reached her, he froze. Elenariel’s body lay upon the jagged rocks, each shard of stone a mute, merciless witness. Her limbs, so graceful in life, lay contorted in a mockery of peace. No breath stirred her lips; no warmth clung to her skin. Even the Silmaril at her side had dimmed to gray, an echo of the vanished light within her eyes.
Slowly, painfully, Thranduil knelt by her side. The trembling of his hands betrayed the only spark of life he had left, and even that felt tainted with horror. He reached out as though through deep water, shoulders bowed beneath the crushing weight of finality. His touch, once gentle and filled with love, now landed upon her lifeless form with the dread acknowledgment that no gesture, no plea, no power could undo what had been wrought here.
Rivulets of moonlight slipped through the canopy, illuminating her face for a fleeting, agonizing moment. With trembling arms, he gathered her to him, pressing his forehead against hers. The world could have ended there, and he would not have known nor cared. Because in holding her, he held only the cruel phantom of what had been stolen from him.
A long, ragged breath escaped him, neither a sob nor a cry but some hollow exhalation like a decayed echo of the man he had once been. Silence coiled around him, oppressive and suffocating, as though the forest itself recoiled from the finality of her death. He was the living embodiment of loss, a king reduced to ruin at the side of the woman who once made life worth living.
And as he stared into the abyss of what remained, Thranduil felt that he, too, had perished on these rocks. The person he was - a king, a lover, a dreamer - was gone, replaced only by a husk of grief bound to a husk of flesh. Darkness deepened around him, and in its merciless grasp, he knew with terrible certainty that nothing in Arda would ever be the same again.