Disclaimer : I own nothing.
Note 1 : The title is from a song by the Editors.
Note 2: This OS is dedicated to my friend Celebriante.
No Sound but the Wind
The leaves were falling under the cloudy sky of autumn. The air was cold. There was a sort of melancholy in the air, as if nature was mourning. The men kept to themselves, rebuilding the city that once was theirs. Under the mountain the songs were not sung in the merry way they used to be. There was a slight humming in the forest : the trees sung the end of the summer along with the elves.
The war had been over for a few month, now, but the time seemed to have stopped. The men didn't carry themselves with pride, the elves remained in the forest. The dwarves could not be seen.
To the elves, though, it was not the war as much as the idea of what was coming back to Middle Earth that quieted them : the evil which once tried to reign upon them had not been defeated for good, and the darkness they thought they had gotten rid of clouded their mind once more.
And on his throne, the Elvenking was still as a statue.
It was not Sauron he was thinking about, though.
Old as he was, Thranduil always had a sense of the passing time - because he saw his son grow up. He had sharp memories of him as a young elf, a young warrior, blue stormy eyes always hungry for a fight. But Legolas's eyes had grown cold as he aged, and though he was still young, there was a scar behind his eyes that Thranduil knew was there because of him.
But time was of no importance now.
Legolas had grown into a hard elf and had gone away without even looking back. Thranduil had wanted to hold him, to whisper the words he had kept to himself for so long. He remembered the laughing Legolas who had kindly taken his mother's hand before she went to battle for the last time, he remembered how quiet he had become at first, when his father had come home alone.
Thranduil believed ghosts in Mirkwood were like shy animals : they only came when all was quiet, when finally, the elves were peacefully resting. So he sat still on his throne. Hours and days and nights and seasons went by and he sat there, surrounded by whispers from the past, haunted by the memories of a world that was gone and would never be again. But at night in the Woodland Realm, while shadows grew in the East, there was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard. There was no ghost, no son eagerly coming home. There was no sound but the wind.