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Legolas looked at the Dwarf to dislike, when first the Fellowship left Rivendell, and was satisfied with everything he saw. To the memory-shadow of Tauriel that lived yet in his mind, he listed the faults one after another: the grating of Gimli’s unmusical voice; the underbrush-shaggy beard sprawling over his breast; his deliberately crude manners. Aragorn and Boromir were all that could be looked for in lords of Men, and the young halflings bore themselves in an easy, pleasant way. But the Dwarf allowed no grace to touch him. His jests were coarse and his speech full of windy bluster. Even at their meals, he ate as untidily as the pack-horse; worse, for tearing at the dried meat and hard journey-bread in great quick gulps, scattering crumbs that he brushed from his barrel-thick thighs with jerky strokes of his hands. Did you truly love such a one? he asked Tauriel silently, disdainful.
Legolas had seen jealousy a few times among others, and it seemed to him a strange, sticky-hot passion, like the sweltering of late summer on the plains far from the greenwood's shade. He wanted none of such a thing: it stirred a memory of uneasy things in him, dark stories of the Noldor, and the ruin of Feanor's sons in their hunger for the Silmarils. He had not coveted Tauriel's love so. Even if she had offered it to him, he could have shared only a bittersweet song with her, like the falling of autumn leaves: an ending joined with a beginning. His father's pride would have demanded more for him than that he bind his life's fate to one of the Silvani, and who had distinguished herself only as a hunter and warrior. Tauriel bore not the elf-light, not that distant reflection of the Two Trees and the glory of Valinor that still lingered in his own blood. Legolas had never stood on those distant shores, but as a young man he had stood with his father beneath the sighing boughs in springtime, hearing the whisper of the great firs, and that light had kindled in his breast.
That knowledge had guarded him from jealousy. He had felt a wistfulness only, and a pricking of his own pride that was as much confusion as anger. What could she have seen in the Dwarf? Kili had been of noble blood among their kind, but so was Gimli son of Gloin, of the lineage of Durin, and he was unlovely, and unpolished as a rock hewn off the side of a mountain by winter ice. Legolas had looked at him hunch-shouldered like a troll beneath the high-vaulted halls of Moria, where Gandalf's light glimmered faintly upon a tracery of mithril-stars far above, like the night sky made anew beneath the earth, and wondered that so much beauty had come from such hands as these.
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But in Lorien, he looked not. Silent himself with grief, he walked alone beneath the shining mallorn-trees, listening to his people's mourning-song for Mithrandir. Night had come, but many of the Galadrim still sang softly in the trees above. He let his feet carry him where they would, until he halted on the edge of a flowering glade near a small curving stream hurrying away to join the cold running waters of Nimrodel, and there he found the Lady Galadriel gazing out across the water, a silver pitcher of water held in her hands.
He waited where he stood. He would not intrude, if she did not wish it. Long had the Lady of Lothlorien searched his heart and memories at their meeting earlier that day, although the touch of her questing will had been gentle on his sorrow. But she had asked him nothing, had offered him no choice such as she had set before the rest of the Company, which might have illuminated his course. If she chose not to offer him counsel, he would not press her for it.
But at length she turned and looked at him, and he crossed the grass to her side. The stream murmured at their feet softly, laughing its simple joy as it fled away over rock and tree-root. She reached a hand to his face and touched it gently with her fingers. "Long has it been since you ran in the gardens of Lindon as a child laughing, and put your hands in the high fountain to try and pluck the leaves reflected there. As I sat in council with Gil-Galad, from a window I saw your hair in the sunlight, and my troubles were eased: for a little while. And yet even then the shadow of the Enemy lay upon us." She dropped her hand, sighing.
"Scarcely do I remember those days," Legolas said. The fountain was a bright distant image, the leaping water and the nodding trees above. He remembered a little better the armor: his father riding away to battle in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men; his mother's hands upon his shoulders, and later the grey sorrow of their return with the shrouded body of Gil-Galad upon its bier: the ending of an age. But even those moments were far-away, barely to be grasped, hidden deep behind the endless green of the Third Age and the gentle passage of the years beneath the leaves of the Greenwood. And yet even as Legolas spoke, it seemed to him the green leaves drew away, and those ancient memories both fair and bitter came bright and clear, as if all the long peace of his days now became the distant memory in their stead.
Galadriel yet looked into his face. She nodded. "For now again we have come to the turning of an age," she said. "Much that is fair must pass away, and much that is good shall be ruined, even if victory shall be achieved. And that is not certain! But still I have hope, even in the fading light. So I will say to you, Legolas son of Thranduil: guard your heart! I would spare you my daughter's grief, and a sundering beyond the Sea."
He did not speak, a sudden fear catching at him. Tauriel came back into his mind for a moment, the bright fierce color of her hair in sunlight, her clear eyes looking back at him, sorrowful, and he was startled and ashamed, for he saw now, in memory, that he had been wrong; his father had been wrong. There had been a light in her, the light of Eressea kindled. He had not seen it, for he had not wished to see. He had loved her not despite but rather for her being of the Silvani; he had loved her steel and her deep roots, as though he might have entwined himself about her and made her hold him fast to Middle-Earth, to hold him back from the call of the Sea.
Yet now he understood in sudden revelation that he would have been a strangler-vine upon her branches. She could not have raised her own limbs towards the sunlight of Eressea, with his desire for Middle-Earth burdening them and holding her down. She had not been unwise to love instead one who loved the light in her, and to keep that love in her own heart after his passing, guiding her to the West. Legolas lowered his head and was silent.
Galadriel did not speak again, but smiled at him sadly, and left him, her gown softly rustling over the green grass. Legolas let his feet carry him back into the mallorn-trees. And perhaps his mind turned into the paths of habit, for his wandering feet brought him without will to a clearing where Gimli labored at a borrowed forge, driving a bellows too large for his height, a heap of weapons beside him: his axe, Boromir's blade, arrow-heads and the halflings' daggers.
The noise was harsh and endless. Gimli worked not quickly as did elf-smiths with their slender ringing hammers that bore their own music; his arm rose and fell with ponderous blows for a long time, a pounding that seemed to enter into Legolas's blood. Almost he felt his heart began to keep time with the strokes, yielding to their rhythm, and he felt almost interrupted when at last Gimli was satisfied with his axe-blade, and set it aside. "Well?" he said, gruffly. "Does your blade need sharpening?"
Legolas started. He realized only then that he had come near the forge, and into view. After a moment he drew his knives and his sword and laid them on the table: slender and shining. "Are you a weapon-smith then, among your own people?" he asked, as Gimli took up the blades.
"Good enough to put an edge back on a blade," Gimli growled, with a bristling look.
"I only wondered whether it was your craft," Legolas said. "I know the fame of Erebor was in gold."
Gimli's brows ceased to look so ferocious. "Before the Dragon came, perhaps," he said, returning to his hammer-strokes. "Little gold crossed our hands after that, and what true skill I have lies in working stone. But there is no blade yet forged that Gloin's son cannot put a clean edge on!"
Another boast, but not without truth. He scowled at the elf-blades Legolas had given him, notched here and there by orcish armor, and then he set upon them with his hammer and his grinding stones; and when he gave them back at length, the blades shone unmarred and gleaming-sharp. Legolas sheathed them and watched him work on the other blades yet a little while longer, in silence, as the sun grew low and the forge threw deep shadows and bursts of orange light across Gimli's face. Legolas did not sleep, but something like dreaming stole upon him little by little, and it seemed to him that he watched not a Dwarf but a figure of stone, rooted in the ground and yet moving, as though the very earth had reared itself up to walk among the mallorn-trees.
He stirred and the image faded, but the sense of it remained; he looked at Gimli and remembered the great hall of Moria again, endlessly vast with the pillars stretching into night above like trees holding up a sky of stone, a whole world lying beneath the earth. Words came suddenly into his mind, in the High Speech: e ondo tulya, an ondo entuulya. From stone they come, and to stone they return. He sat watching Gimli's hands moving ceaselessly upon the bellows, the steel of his hammer, the fire of the forge, the iron of the anvil: all a part of him, of the earth from which they all had come, and an unexpected nameless yearning lanced through Legolas, an arrow-shaft passing cleanly through flesh, with pain only after.
He did not understand the feeling, but he flinched nevertheless. Gimli continued his labor, but Legolas stole quietly away without making a farewell.
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