#angmeril

"Do not be afraid!" Angmeril told him. "You can eat it. Just—perhaps eat less than you think you want, to start with? The taste can be…" Her smooth, beardless face did something complicated as though she were struggling against some terrible weight to find her words. "Overpowering," she said at last.

"Overpowering," Legolas repeated numbly. "Yes."

Gimli looked at the apple in his hand. The archer's fingers were gripped as tight upon the round red fruit as they had ever been upon his bow.

Galadriel drifted over. Gimli noticed her at once, of course; even here in the Blessed Realms, her presence was like a sunrise. He turned towards her like a flower moving to face the morning's light.

"The Queen of Greenwood speaks the truth, Lockbearer," she told him. Gimli did not see the grimace pass across Angmeril's face at Galadriel's use of her long-defunct title, but he knew it was there; it was always there, when anyone referred to Legolas's mother by anything but her own unadorned name. "Nothing here will harm you, but until you are used to the bounty of Aman it would be prudent for you to exercise moderation."

"I know not why I am surprised, my lady," Gimli said, bowing over a warm smile, "to find that the food here is different than it is in Middle-earth, when even the light itself shines so much more brightly than it ever did at home."

"Different, yes," Galadriel said. "This is almost—almost!—what fruit tasted like before the Fall of the Two Trees," she told them, and her smile held a sadness so ancient as to be almost unfathomable. "All food since then," she explained in answer to Gimli's startled look, "has tasted a little of ashes and loss to elven tongues. Even now, I can taste the trace of ashes in the fruit of Aman—but less, so much less, than that which is grown in the ravaged soil of Middle-earth. Ah, but you," Galadriel continued, cupping a gentle hand around Legolas's cheek, "you have never tasted food from before the Fall, have you child? So you would not know."

She drifted away, leaving Legolas staring after her with wide eyes.

"Well," Gimli said, "I'm going to find out."

He took the apple from Legolas's unprotesting hands and bit off a hearty chunk. He almost choked on the sudden explosion of taste upon his tongue. "This—but this—!" he cried, rather incoherently before managing to swallow. It was an apple, yes, but an apple such as he had never dreamed of before; or an apple, perhaps, that was the very essence of every dream of apples distilled to its strongest, purest essence. He had never tasted the like, and did not know if he would dare ever to again for fear of how it sent him reeling.

The sound of Hobbitish laughter helped to ground him again, and he turned to find old Bilbo walking up, his smile bright and his small eyes gleaming with mischief. "Ah, the first taste! You'll never quite forget that shock, lads," he told them. He looked up at Angmeril. "What did they start with?"

"Apples."

Bilbo's grin broadened. "Apples! That's a very good one. Apples, yes I like that. A splendid choice. Poor Sam, the first thing he put in his mouth when he got here was some of Frodo's potatoes. I thought he was never going to stop crying, thinking that Frodo had so outpaced him in the cooking department!" The old Hobbit chuckled. "It was quite a nasty trick to pull on him, although utterly unintentional of course. He can still barely eat potatoes without grumbling about it."

Gimli laughed and clapped Bilbo on the back. "Well, given that one bite of an apple was enough to nearly knock me off my feet, I'm not sure I'm quite up to Samwise's potatoes yet—but tell him that as soon as I can get myself settled, I'll be more than happy to taste his efforts and delight in them. It has been far too long since I've eaten Hobbit cooking!"

"I can see that just by looking at you, Master Gimli," Bilbo retorted. "But we'll soon get you sorted-out, never you fear. You and your longshanks there!"

Still chuckling, the Hobbit ushered the dwarf away to one of the other tables, no doubt eager to watch him sputter over some other overpowering delicacy of the Undying Lands.

Legolas turned to his mother. "I—I never realized—!"

"That the world you lived in was full of ashes?" Angmeril said gently. "Yes, my little leaf. Ashes and regrets—but joy, too. Was there not joy, too? Bright as Aman is, it has never held the sort of joy that Middle-earth did for me, ashes or no ashes." She clutched his shoulder, her worried eyes fixed on his face. "And you were happy there, weren't you? We tried so hard to see that you were happy."

"Of course I was happy, naneth," Legolas said, sounding almost indignant at the question even as he wrapped his arms around her. "How could anyone fail to be happy under our trees?"

Angmeril thought of all the stories she had heard of the Greenwood since she had been forced from Middle-earth's shores, all the grim whispers and dark tales brought over the Sea after her about Shadow creeping through the trees and driving her people ever farther from the rotten heart of Dol Guldur, the dark citadel that laired like a great and terrible spider in their woods; she thought of the steady trickle of wounded elves sailing to join her here, with their stories of constant battles against fell creatures and fouler things that her people had been forced to fight without her; the battles that her son had grown-up knowing as the only way of life there was. She thought of her Thranduil, desperately trying to hold the Shadow at bay and keep their people safe in the heart of that darkness; thought of her family left behind, beyond the reach of her love or her protection, ever fighting against the dark that had driven her from them. And she thought of her people telling her also of Legolas laughing in those dark trees, unafraid.

She smiled. "I truly do not know."

{ read more legolas and gimli fic on AO3 here }

When he set foot upon the White Shores, he was greeted by one of the first.

"Mae govannen, meltha-nín."

Thranduil stood in the foam of the waves and stared at the elf-woman in front of him. She was short and slim as a sapling, with cheeks the soft brown of an oak and hair only a shade lighter. Her grey eyes were bright as sun-kissed iron and her smile was as small as a half-grown flowerbud. She was dressed in flowing robes of green in many colors, as though she walked clad in all the shades of a summertime forest. Her hair hung loose and unbound, so long that it kissed the sands under her bare brown feet. Fine silver clasped her wrists, un-bejeweled but clearly of skillful Dwarven make.

"Angmeril?" Thranduil gasped.

She laughed and spread her arms and he ran up the sands into them, crying out with joy and ancient grief as he caught her up and swung her three times through the air. Those who had known the elvenking in later days would have gaped to see him cavorting so carefree upon the shores, an untroubled laugh upon his lips and a smile altogether unconstrained across his face.

"I almost did not recognize you," he murmured, when he set her down at last.

"It has been that long?" Angmeril said archly.

"Your hair is so long," Thranduil breathed, lifting a soft brown lock with bewildered awe.

Angmeril's smile cracked wider, twisting crooked upon her face; it was the sort of smile that was kept often hidden and could only be teased-out by a rare and secret jest.

"Well," she said, "you did take a very long time to join us."

Thranduil frowned. "I am sorry—"

"I am not," she cut him off harshly. "I am not. I tried to swim back seven times, my love. Ulmo got very tired of me."

Thranduil laughed.

"Had you come even a minute before you truly wanted to leave; if I suspected even now that you had come for me rather than yourself," Angmeril cautioned him fiercely, "I would gut you even now upon these shores and you would have to wade your way back to us through the Halls of Mandos."

Thranduil beamed at her brightly enough to for a moment outshine the sun. He bent to press his lips upon her brow. "Oh my love," he breathed, "I have missed you so."

"Well, you are stuck here until the ending of the world now, like the rest of us," she retorted, "so we shall have plenty of time to make-up for our lost years now."

"True," said Thranduil, and they set off arm-in-arm across the grass. Thranduil kept sneaking glances at the elf-woman at his side, as though he could not believe the truth of his own eyes. She caught him looking and raised her eyebrows in a wry, silent question. "Ah, my iron-flower," he explained, "I still cannot help but marvel at your hair!"

"As I said," Angmeril replied coyly, "you took a long time to join us. I did not want to cut it again without you here."

"Ah," said Thranduil, and a crooked smile to match his wife's teased its way across his face.

"You enjoyed witnessing the reactions so much the last time, after all," Angmeril teased. "And that was a grim army in the midst of a terrible siege. How much more shocked and outraged will all these fine Lords and Ladies be, here in fair and peaceful Aman where they say no ills or hurts can ever find us?"

Thranduil's laugh rang out loud and long across the dunes. "Oh," he said again, "I have missed you so."

They smiled together, the onetime Queen and King of Mirkwood, and walked forward together into forever, whether the rest of the dwellers of Aman were ready for them there or no.

{ read more of my lotr fic on AO3 here }

Gimli stepped back, his palms raised in surrender. He shook his head at the hands that stretched back towards him. "Nay!" he gasped, his chest heaving in exertion. "Peace, you fiends! I must rest 'ere I fall off my feet."

The elves laughed and returned to their dancing, Legolas pausing just long enough to catch Gimli's eye and raise his brows in a silent question. Gimli nodded—he was fine, perfectly fine! He just needed a moment to breathe, for Mahal's sake!—and Legolas grinned and let himself be pulled back into the merry tumult under the trees.

Gimli brushed sweat-damp curls out of his face and looked around the clearing for a suitable seat. He did not want to go too far from the fire: the night pressed-in dark around the vibrant circle of elvish revelry and while Eryn Lasgalen was a more peaceful place than it had once been, his father's stories about Mirkwood lingered in his mind. Gimli was not keen to go wandering these woods with neither path nor elf to guide him back out of the shadows, not even now that those shadows at last were lightening to match the new name of their lands.

He spotted a likely log lying comfortably within the fire's glow, and Gimli made his way across the grass towards his pending seat with only two interruptions of elves trying to pull him back into the dance. He demurred politely and they shrugged and flitted off to their merriment without him.

The dwarf had to admit that Legolas had not been boasting when he had told Gimli that no one in all of Middle-earth hosted a revel quite as enthusiastically as the elves of Mirkwood. He had scoffed at first, expecting celebrations more in line with the gentle merrymaking he had experienced in Lórien, or the cozy nights of song in Rivendell. What he had found instead was carousing more akin to that which he'd experienced briefly in Rohan, yet somehow more raucous and unflagging. Mirkwood's elves cavorted as though they were going to war with sleep and sorrow both, and each twirl of their dance was a salvo in the battle against solemnity.

Gimli had kept up well, at first; dwarves are experienced revel-makers and they take their celebrations as seriously as they do their crafts or mining. But there comes a point in the night where dwarven celebrations turn from rowdy to melancholic, and in Mirkwood no such slower periods were allowed to dilute the tireless tumult of their festivities. The wine kept flowing, the songs kept rising, and the dancers kept spiraling around the fire as swift as arrows in the wind.

The problem, Gimli had finally determined, was that elves did not know how to appreciate sleep. It was because they did not partake of it properly, he thought, wandering as they did through half-waking dreams rather than sinking fully into slumber like reasonable folk. They did not know how to truly rest, so they simply kept going about their revels long past when all sensible peoples would have taken to their beds—aye, and then woke again without taking nearly enough time for slumber in between!

He was only a few feet away from the log where he intended to rest his feet when he realized that one end of it was already occupied; so still was the elf sitting upon it that, in the shadows at the edge of the clearing his green and brown garb blended almost completely with the foliage around him. Gimli was not sure if his presence would be welcomed or not—anyone sitting solitary at a bacchanal like this was doubtless seeking solitude rather than interruption by a near-stranger—but it would have been impolite to immediately turn aside, so he resolved himself to make a few minutes of polite conversation at least before taking himself off to some other seat and leaving the other to his chosen seclusion.

"Mae govanen," Gimli said with a respectful bow. "Forgive the intrusion," he continued when the elf—Gimli thought he recognized him as one of the guards he had met on his first arrival to the forest, although his head was muzzy enough that he knew it would take him several seconds to place the proper name—gave him a nod in response. He was still dressed in the light molded-leaf jerkin that served Eryn Lasgalen's warriors for armor and sported elegant bracers on his arms, but his sleeves beneath the armor were short enough to expose pale arms that were muscled almost thickly enough to belong to a Man although not, of course, to a Dwarf. His dark hair and white face were striking in the firelight—few of the elves of Eryn Lasgalen were quite so pale, and fewer of them sported such sharp contrast in their coloring—but it was the breadth of his shoulders and the stoutness of his arms that Gimli noticed the most. He was still uncomfortably slim to dwarven eyes, but less so than any other elf that Gimli had met. Had someone chopped his limbs down to a more reasonable length, he could almost have passed for a normal, if unhealthily skinny, person—at least if someone had loaned him a beard!

Realizing he was staring impolitely in his attempt to put a name to the face in front of him, Gimli offered a friendly smile and continued teasingly, "I do not wish to bring merriment with me to where it is unwanted, but if you will allot me a few moments in which to rest my tired feet from the revels you have chosen to eschew, I promise to keep my merry-making to a minimum in the interim and thus refrain from interrupting your repose."

He meant it as a jest, likely to segue into a bit of banter about dwarven endurance or perhaps commiseration about the other's likewise weary toes, but perhaps the elf could not see the grin on Gimli's face beneath his beard for he responded to his words as though they had been spoken in grim seriousness: "It is true, Lord Gimli, I am not much for merriment, but you are welcome to take your rest for as long as you like regardless of however much mirth you might feel or express; your presence brings no distress."

Gimli was taken aback but he hid it well; with another short bow he settled himself upon the lower curve of the fallen branch and stretched his legs out in front of him with a contented sigh.

"My thanks, Master Elf," he said, and finally the name came back to him: Eregmegil, the tallest of the elves of Eryn Lasgalen that Gimli had yet met, although that was not evident while he was seated thus. "You are a most generous host." Gimli glanced sidelong at the elf, but if Eregmegil's pale face evinced any particular feeling it was not distinct enough for Gimli to discern it in the dim shadows at the fire's edge.

As for Gimli, he smiled vaguely as a familiar laugh rose from Legolas's lips above above the nearby tumult, but he made no effort to spot the whirl of his golden hair twirling amid the rest of the cavorting elves. It was enough to know that his friend was happy; enough to sit here in peace and be happy himself.

The dwarf had abandoned his light jest at Eregmegil's words, being much more intrigued by this stoic elf than by his planned banter. "I hope you will not think it over-rude of a curious stranger if I ask why you have come to this revel, then, if you have no care for such things?" He flapped a hand in the general direction of the fire and the frolicking figures circling it. "Surely you would enjoy your evening more elsewhere, if you take no pleasure in such nonsensical cavorting?"

"My king is here, so I am here," Eregmegil said flatly.

Gimli was startled enough that he knew it showed on his face; only the fact that Eregmegil was not looking at him, but rather at the swirl of dancers at the fire, spared him the embarrassment of being seen to give such an impolite reaction. He could not help himself; it was a genuinely startling statement. The elves of Eryn Lasgallen were probably the least conscious of their king's rank as any people in all of Middle-earth, at least any that Gimli had yet met.

Dwarves were not given to standing on unnecessary ceremony themselves, but even at their most casual they were always conscious of their king's status as the king. These elves, by contrast, seemed to treat Thranduil more like a communal father-figure than as a ruler. Legolas and his sister did not even seem to qualify as royalty in the eyes of their people (no wonder, then, that Legolas had been more prone to introduce himself by his land than his lineage!) and while Rílaerloth was at least beneficiary of the respect afforded her as a commander of their warriors, Legolas—despite all of his heroic deeds—seemed to be viewed still as little more than a hapless child by many of his fellows, as though he were the whole forest's little brother rather than Rílaerloth's alone.

This behavior was strange to Gimli, and even after many days spent in company with Eryn Lasgalen's people he was still not used to their casual disregard for rank or ceremony—or so he had thought, until he was confronted by an example of someone acting more according to his expectations. Gimli was intrigued. Thranduil's people regularly showed affection for him, yes, but this was the first time he had seen any of them express the sort of dutiful devotion that beloved kings oft engendered in other lands.

He studied Eregmegil where he sat on the log beside him, but the pale elf's profile was as smooth and emotionless as if he had been carved from white granite.

"Think you that Thranduil requires a guard, then?" Gimli asked. "I thought the threats had been driven from your trees." He could not quite resist the urge to squint into the darkness past Eregemegil's shoulders—broad for an elf, Gimli noted, but still scrawny as a sapling by dwarven standards—although he was certain that the flickers of ominous motion he saw between the black silhouettes of the trees were only the result of his eyes and the flickering firelight playing tricks on him.

He was almost certain, anyway.

"Many of them have been," Eregmegil acknowledged. "The largest are all destroyed, and the rest have been hounded far from our halls, at any rate." His voice was no more coarse than any elf's but there was something to the tone of his words that made them seem more brusque than what Gimli was accustomed to hearing from his friend's people; a flatness that stood in stark contrast to the musical lilt that Gimli had begun to think was an innate part of elvish tongues.

"And yet you stay to guard him?" Gimli observed curiously. "That is admirable devotion."

For a long time Eregmegil stared at him in silence, so that Gimli began to think that he had offended the tall elf. He cast his mind about for a suitable apology, but before he could make one, Eregmegil broke their gaze to look back into the fire instead and said:

"He carried me out of Doriath."

"Doriath?" Gimli repeated, the half-formed phrasing of his repentance dashed instantly from his mind. He knew the name of Doraith, and recognition made his heart sink. "Ahh…"

"It was the Fëanoreans who brought tragedy to Doriath, in my case," Eregmegil said. The glance he slotted sideways at Gimli seemed to shine with a glimmer of momentary amusement at odds with his otherwise impassive mien before he faced forward again, stoic as ever.

Gimli nodded and tried to resist the urge to breathe a telltale sigh of relief.

"I was a child when they came, too small to fight," Eregmegil continued. His bland voice carried a bitter undercurrent. "My sister grabbed me and ran, but they pursued. She tried to fight, but she was no warrior. They dashed her knife from her hand and stabbed her with it. We fell, she curling low to protect me still. They stabbed her again with their long swords—stabbed us both as we lay there, but her body shielded mine and I was cut only along the arm." He gestured to the offending limb and Gimli was startled to see what seemed to be a long, thin scar along the pallid flesh. "She was cut deeper. I lay there, pinned beneath her like a caged bird, and watched as her fae left her eyes. I felt her grow cold in my mind and against my skin as we lingered there in the dark. She died, and I lay there trapped by her dead weight and my own sorrow."

Gimli's breath caught in his chest and strangled whatever insufficient words of sympathy he might have offered. Eregmegil did not seem to notice; he spoke matter-of-factly, although his eyes flashed with dark shadows in the firelight.

"It was Thranduil who pulled me from the ruin of her body," the tall elf continued calmly. "He heard my tears, somehow, even over the clash of battle that echoed through Menegroth's halls. Bleeding, his surviving father dangling half-dead at his side, his hands filled with the bloody swords of his living and dead father both, the Fëanoreans close on his heels, Thranduil still stopped and pulled me from my sister's arms. He set me on his shoulders and carried me, carried both Lord Oropher and myself, out from the ruin of Doriath; somehow still fighting to defend us all despite his burdens and his wounds and his own losses; carried me away from the darkness of our dying home and back into the light of the world beyond."

Gimli did not know if it was some trick of the firelight reflecting off of Eregmegil's grim grey eyes, or a result of the many droughts of heady elvish wine he had quaffed this night, but for a moment he could almost see it: the great halls of lost Menegroth, once a glorious testament to the marvels that could be crafted when elf and dwarf worked hand-in-hand, now incarnadined with blood and darkened with betrayal; its proud torches sputtering or gone out altogether, cut-down by enemy hands; too many fair elvish bodies strewn about the fastness of the Thousand Caves, cut down cruelly by blades of elvish make wielded by elvish hands; and one small child, sobbing into his sister's silent sleeve. Then from the shadows staggered Thranduil, his golden locks stained ruddy with blood, bare blades gleaming in both hands, one arm wrapped tight around his father's waist with Oropher's arm dangling limp across his shoulders, both elves bleeding heavily from many wounds; the elder nearly insensate and the younger wild-eyed and desperate, yet still in enough possession of his senses and his compassion to stop to help a fearful child…

(If the younger Thranduil in Gimli's imagination looked more like his son than like himself, well, what of it?)

He blinked, and the vision vanished, and there was once more only dark trees looming before his eyes. He cleared his throat, and managed to murmur something that expressed his sorrow for Eregmegil's losses without revealing the depths of his horror at such suffering at the hands of those who should have been kith or even kin rather than bloody-handed enemies; dwarves had fought amongst themselves in ages past too, of course, but somehow the level tone of Eregmegil's recitation made Gimli's skin crawl more than any tales of those regrettable conflicts had ever done.

(Maybe it was just that he kept picturing Legolas stumbling down those bloodstained halls rather than his father.)

Eregmegil accepted Gimli's admittedly less-than-eloquent sympathies with an impassive nod. Wishing to draw both his and the elf's thoughts to lighter places, Gimli cleared his throat again and asked, "So, ah, what was next? I confess I do not know the history of this forest as well as I should, but I believe that Thranduil and his father settled somewhere nearby before venturing forth to Greenwood, is that not so?"

"Yes," Eregmegil said. "We fled to Lindon. I was reunited with my surviving relations there. They made a home among the Green-elves and the other refugees who settled in Ossiriand." He was looking at the fire again rather than the dwarf, or perhaps at the dancers; his blank expression was as unreadable as his voice. "But Thranduil and Oropher were not content to live there among so many Noldor, not after the fall of Menegroth. Not after the Kinslaying. And nor was I. They soon left to go east, to find the Silvan elves who still lived there—here," he amended, tilting one palm up to gesture at the forest around them.

There should have been more bitterness in Eregmegil's voice, Gimli thought; bitterness or scorn or something. This cool, too-calm recital made him shiver despite the warmth of the fire.

"Oropher hoped to find somewhere to live in better ways, more elvish ways; the ways in which our people lived before the Valar meddled and the Enemy made war upon us," the elf continued in his passionless way. "My relatives would not leave the new home they sought to craft in Ossiriand, but I already knew then that my place would henceforth be ever at Thranduil's side. I joined with the handful of other Sindar who chose to leave Lindon and seek-out the elves who had never joined the pilgrimage of the Valar; who had never been coaxed to abandon their native lands or customs."

"Were you not still a child?" Gimli asked, surprised. He was no expert on elvish history, of course, but he had been curious enough about Legolas's homeland to question his friend about its founding, and he had thought that he had a better sense of the timeline than this. Had not Oropher left Ossiriand within only a few years? Perhaps Eregmegil had simply been older than Gimli had pictured him in the story of Doriath's destruction; he might have been only a little shy of his majority, like Gimli himself had been when his father had joined Thorin's expedition to Mirkwood all those years ago: Old enough to feel that he was being left behind, but still seen as a child in his people's eyes.

Eregmegil nodded, however. "A child, yes, but not a fool," he said in a dry voice. "I did not ask for permission, and so my relations could not deny me. I left with my lord and came to Greenwood." He looked around at the tall, dark trees that rose into the black night sky far overhead, beyond the heavy leaves, and his grey eyes were as flat as the dullest stone that Gimli had ever carved. He did not smile at the trees. Had Gimli seen any elf in this forest fail to smile at their trees, even the most shadowed and twisted of them? And these trees were bright and merry in comparison to many of their fellows, as though they too shared in the delight of the elves for their firelit revelry.

"And have you been here ever since?" the dwarf asked carefully. "Or are you newly-returned, now that the Shadow has lifted?"

"I left these woods only once, to follow my lord to war in Mordor," Eregmegil replied. "It would take more than Shadow in the trees to tear me from his side.  Wherever Thranduil goes I will follow him, even unto the breaking of the world and yet beyond."

Gimli could not help but shiver at the weight of those words. There may have been no oath sworn—or then again there may have been, in days long ago before Gimli's father's father was born to hear it—but there was a surety to Eregmegil's voice that was as unshakable as any vow. He meant what he spoke with every fiber of his elvish fae, and he would damn himself to the Void before he forsook that intent.

"And yes," Eregmegil continued, and once again there seemed to be the faintest flicker of amusement across his grim lips, gone so fast that Gimli could not be sure he had not imagined it, "also to these merry revels that you seem to find so trying."

"I do not find them trying in the least," Gimli protested. "I quite enjoy them, in fact—I am simply tired!" He shifted on the log and scowled petulant. "Well and after all, I am much shorter than the other dancers," the dwarf added, feeling unaccountably as though he needed to justify himself. "I must work twice as hard as them to keep-up with the pace of their cavorting. No wonder I tire before the rest!" he blustered, despite knowing very well that the heart of the problem was not the speed of the dance nor the unseemly length of elvish legs, but rather the fact that elves simply had no proper appreciation for the merits of slumber, strange creatures that they were. Gimli was a stout and hearty dwarf, and justly proud of his strength and endurance; he was simply mortal, that was all, and as such he needed to sometimes refresh himself in ways that these flibbertigibbet elves would never comprehend.

"I stand corrected," Eregmegil murmured, and Gimli was certain this time that he detected a flicker of genuine amusement ghosting briefly across the elf's thin lips.

He harrumphed a grudging acknowledgement of Eregmegil's words and propped his chin in his hands, the better to watch the dancing. His eyes slowly drifted out of focus and he sank into something that was halfway to a doze, content to let his thoughts float as aimlessly and amiably as the blurry figures of the cavorting elves in front of him. As tiring as elvish dancing could be for a mortal participant, there was something restful about watching them too. 

"Do not mistake me, Master Dwarf," Eregmegil said after a while, shaking Gimli from his reverie.  "I do not dislike the revels of my people." Eregmegil nodded at the fire, and the whirling shapes of the other elves cavorting wildly around it, their lithe forms coming slowly back into focus as Gimli blinked. "I simply prefer to enjoy them from the edges here, where I can find pleasure in their delight without feeling compelled to manifest any of my own."

Eregmegil's gaze slanted back to Gimli, and now the dwarf could see a hollow darkness behind the mirror-like grey eyes that fixed so coolly upon his own. Had it been there all along, unnoticed, or had speaking of the past brought the vacuous shadows to the forefront? Gimli could not say, but no more could he unsee them now. "Whatever joy I once found in dance or in song went out of this world when my sister's spirit fled to the Halls of Mandos," Eregmegil continued flatly. "But it pleases me to see my people's joy, and in this bitter world that is comfort enough for me."

In the months since Legolas first heard the gulls at Pelargir, Gimli had developed a habit of skirting all mention of the Sea. It was thus not difficult for him to restrain the urge to ask why Eregmegil had not sought the healing of the Undying Lands that so many of his people sailed away to find when their spirits fell to the burden of such unendurable grief. He did not need to ask; he already knew the answer. Eregmegil surely knew as well as any elf—and far better than any dwarf, even one named elvellon—that the wounds of his soul could be staunched in fair and distant Valinor. But leaving would mean leaving his king's side, which would be the most grievous wound of all. And so he stayed, and carried the shadow of his losses with him, and endured.

Not for the first time, Gimli thought that the unmeasured lives of the elves was far from the enviable gift that so many mortals seemed to think them. If they had lived solely in joy, then their years unending might be something to covet—but the more time Gimli spent with elves, the more tragedy and sorrow he saw surrounding them. He had never brooded on the inevitability of Mahal's Peace the way so many Men repeatedly shied-away from their own inevitable end, had never feared the inevitability of his own ending; but sitting here at the edge of the firelight with Eregmegil, Gimli thought that rather than simply inevitable, there might be a certain comfort in the knowledge that one day an end would come to him. There would never be a day when he sat, two Ages of the world removed from the deaths of his kin, separated from the joy of his people by the weight of his own grief.

A flash of gold in the firelight caught Gimli's eye and he smiled instinctively at the sight of Legolas whirling like a wild thing in his friends' arms. The dwarf's tired feet ached just from looking at the roister of the dance, but like Eregmegil he was pleased enough simply to watch the unflagging joy of those who spun.

Legolas had described Mirkwood revels as though they were weapons against the darkness that hung over their forests, and Gimli had thought he had understood what his friend meant before, but he realized that it was only now, sitting beside grim and grieving Eregmegil, that he truly grasped the meaning of this defiant cheer.

The elves of Mirkwood—or Greenwood, or Eryn Lasgalen, or whatever else one chose to call this forest; the shadows that had defined it for so long hung over it still, even as they finally began to lessen, whatever name it bore—they were not less cognizant of elvish sorrows than their grander kin; in some ways perhaps they knew those sorrows better, for there was nothing to insulate the simple elves of Mirkwood from their weight, nothing but their own deliberate scorn for the sadness that strove to claim them.