Morwinyon was four when her mother disappeared. She could not say her father changed after that, exactly, but neither was he exactly the same. She never recalled Mirkwood swarming with visitors, due only in part to the giant spiders, but after her mother few left to visit other places either. Now no one visited, and Mirkwood was a dreary place for a young elvish girl who longed only to do great deeds – or at least deeds.
So now, a little over two centuries later, she sat in her windowseat and watched her brother go out with a group of scouts, Tauriel at his right hand, all armed and ready for battle.
Morwinyon was very much afraid her father would never think her ready for battle. Her weapons hung on the wall, used only privately since her few disastrous ventures with the scouts. No one had died and no one had been hurt, but that was almost the problem. Nothing had happened. She had thought her squad particularly lucky until she had heard two of those who had accompanied her whispering about the adjusted patrol schedule.
She and her fellow scouts, who referred to themselves as her guards in this conversation, were sent out only after another group had cleaned out the area they were to patrol by order of the king.
"Morwinyon," her father said when she had stammered out her mortification to him later, tripping over her words in her fury, "I was only trying to keep you safe."
Something had boiled up inside her then, something beyond anger, and she turned on her heel and walked out. Thranduil did not readjust the patrols. Morwinyon did not go out again – let everyone who could do real work, she thought. She did not know how Legolas had avoided their father's overprotectiveness, except that he had been an adult long before Morwinyon had been born. Perhaps her father had grown used to thinking of him as an adult.
"There is a fire in us," Laeriel had told her daughter once. "I know not if it is for good or ill, but it is there either way, and it is not comfortable. It will never be: it is not supposed to be. We must do something with it, I think, or we will burn from the inside out."
Morwinyon had failed to impart the idea to Thranduil.
So she sat at her windowsill and stared out at the forest, feeling spent and too full of energy at the same time, hands tingling with a need to use them.
"I am an adult," she told the forest outside her window. "I do not need his permission, not really."
The trees did not deign to reply.
She was still looking out the window when Tauriel and Legolas returned. They were much earlier than expected – only two meals had been delivered to Morwinyon's door since they had left. She had been picking desultorily at a pile of mixed greens, book open on the window ledge, when her brother and friend came over the bridge with a company of dwarves in tow.
She sat up, setting aside tray and fork and leaning out, going so far as to open the casement. She had never met a dwarf for obvious reasons, but she had read about them, as she had read about the Dunedain and the horselords and anything and anyone else she could find books or scrolls about. And dwarves were not evil, as orcs were, or swayed easily to the shadow, as her brother told her men so often were. They could not be so much trouble – and surely her father would not refuse hospitality to enemies of the shadow, whatever race they belonged to.
Tauriel looked up while crossing the bridge and saw her leaning out the window and raised a hand just enough to wave to Morwinyon before turning her attention back to the dwarves. Legolas, too, looked up, and smiled ever so slightly. Some of the dwarves followed their line of sight, squinting. Morwinyon wondered if they could see her – she knew that dwarves' eyesight was not nearly as keen as elves'. How much worse was it, though? She leaned out farther, bracing herself on the window ledge, but the dwarves were herded inside before she could study them as much as she would like.
She sat back, leaving the casement open. A breeze stirred the pages of the book she had put aside, leaving it open to an artist's rendering of her parents' storied defeat of Dagnir. The dragon looked cowed as it flinched away from her mother, whose sword gleamed brighter than anything else on the page. Even from the back Laeriel gave the impression of surety and strength. Morwinyon wanted to be like that: every well-meaning comment on her resemblance to her mother stung, reminding her that she would never be like her mother, not really, not unless she actually did something with her time besides practicing drills alone or wheedling Tauriel into sparring with her.
Sometime, years ago, Legolas had said very dryly that Thranduil's full confidence could only be given to someone who had slain a dragon. Since only one person living who had done so, and that person was Thranduil himself, the elf her brother had been consoling had taken themselves off with a sigh. The offhanded remark had stuck with the young elf lurking in the shadows.
Morwinyon had not considered literally slaying a dragon. Not really. Some monumental task, though. Something to make her father take her seriously. And there would have to be good reason for her to do it, or else her father would send someone else without ever considering her.
She had still read – and reread – everything available on the subject of dragons. Thus had she learned that Smaug the Golden still lived, and had sacked Erebor in the year 2770: the same year of her birth, and only a bare month earlier. Ever since she had felt a sort of proprietary interest. Not in the mountain – her father's halls were carved from rock and root, and she did not see how halls carved from a mountain would be appreciably different – but with Smaug himself.
It was not entirely right, to have such a fascination with dragons, let alone to christen one in your mind as 'your' dragon. Dragons did, after all, burn buildings and raze towns and eat people, and by all accounts they did it for fun. Morwinyon had come to terms with her own peculiarities long ago, though, when she had tried asking Legolas about a sort of unspecified want low in her belly when she looked at certain elves that had nothing to do with her fondness (or lack thereof) for the elf in question. Legolas had not known what she meant, and neither had Tauriel. Morwinyon was not going to ask her father: even then, before the scouting fiasco, she had not thought he would give her any answer did not keep her the version of 'safe' he ascribed to. Having a slight obsession with dragonlore was at least understandable.
Also understandable, if slightly more frowned upon, was her tendency to lurk around, above, or below Thranduil's audience chamber, for how else was she to learn anything? The habit had begun as a way to avoid her minders when Tauriel or Legolas was away. Those minders rarely had the creativity or bravery to look for her in such exalted quarters: perhaps if they had, Morwinyon would not have minded them minding her so much. She had gotten even better at hiding over the years. These days no one bothered to look for her if she disappeared, even for a day or two.
Now, too, she knew places to perch where she could overhear whole meetings or just watch her father as he stared off into nothing. Before she had gotten the knack for it, she had asked Tauriel for news. Tauriel never lied to her if Morwinyon asked, but she had also often told Morwinyon that she was not allowed to speak of things.
So Morwinyon watched Thranduil's audience with the dwarf who claimed right of ownership over the mountain currently inhabited by her dragon, and considered.