Chapter Two: A Fate Foretold
By BlackDeath
Adanethael had been gifted with the Sight.
Sight was rare among Silvan Elves. The High Elves of the Eldar were known to jealously guard their gifts of prophecy, marrying close within their bloodlines to preserve its strength. If the Low Clans of the Nandor and Avari had concerns for their future they were left to seek their own answers, and it was Tauriel's Adaeinior they sought out for guidance.
She remembered how, during the Solstice of All Colors of her girlhood, Adanethael had promised to read their fates. She and Gannelwen had fidgeted with excitement, waiting impatiently for their mother and father to retire. Adaeinior had chided them both, though there had been the sparkle of mischief in her old eyes.
Tauriel took after Adanethael. Like her, she was the only other among her kin to break the line of more than five successive generations of those who had not been born with a firecrown. But for this bad luck, her grandmother had nevertheless been well-respected among her people. Tauriel had often wondered if it would one day be the same for her.
"You first, Ganna."
Her younger sister extended her hand. Gannelwen was fortunate—she took after their parents, both fair and dark of look. Adanethael had smiled and studied her palm.
"I see laughter and joy in your life; music and water. You will be a dancer, Ganna. Your heart shall be full of singing dreams. You will dance with the enchantments of Nessa. The King himself will call upon you to grace his feasting halls."
Gannelwen's face had lit from within, rapt with pleasure. She was already an admirable dancer. It made Tauriel squirm in her seat with envy. Adanethael's eyes had roamed ponderously between them.
"We must not wish ill upon the happiness seen in the path of another."
Tauriel flushed.
"Now you, hên."
Tauriel offered her palm. Adanethael took it just as she had with Gannelwen, peering into its etchings and folds.
"I see pain."
Tauriel's breath caught like a rabbit in a snare.
"Lle naa belegohtar. You will spill the blood of your enemies but it will come at a price. Yours will be a path of pain, sacrifice…and love."
Adanethael lingered, smoothing the evil line she traced in Tauriel's palm with a fingertip. It was as insignificant and thin as a crow's scratch—deceptive in the cruel trick of fate it subjected her to.
"For all of this suffering you shall know the greatest of loves."
She finished and pulled away. Tauriel felt a great hollow inside herself; as if she had been robbed of something she had not known she possessed. She lifted her hand to her eyes, but couldn't see any sign of the wretched life Adanethael had seen that awaited her.
Tauriel glanced to her side at Ganna, sure she would laugh. Two milky eyes stared sightlessly at her. The pale orc that held her head in its fist roared. Adanethael lay mangled on the floor, red hair mingling with the red river that flowed from her throat. The orc saw Tauriel and advanced, curving its massive sword high in the air and bringing it down with all the weight and fury of death.
She woke.
Tauriel rose and filled a wooden bowl with water. She cupped it in her hands and brought it to her face. It did little to wash away the scald of dreams.
She went back to her pallet. She looked at her bow that she had carelessly heaped on the chair with her armor the night before.
Lle naa belegohtar.
She had become a warrior—but a great one was debatable. That part of Adanethael's fate reading had not come true.
"Run to the trees, Tauriel! Take Gannelwen!"
There were many things that had not come true.
Tauriel smoothed her fingers over the spun quilt beside her. Her mother had toiled over it long ago, the patterns of their clan woven into the simple fabric. It was one of the few things that were left to her. There would be no others like it; her talent was not with needles.
Her eyes were dry. She could no longer weep. The years had left sun-cracked riverbeds in her heart. She had been too young to save them. She could not even save herself.
They slipped through the small window in their mother and father's chamber. Tauriel made Gannelwen go first.
"Quick! I can hear them!"
Adanethael locked the door after she pushed them into the room. Tauriel heard her screams and the black laughter of the orcs on the other side. S he suffered with howling desire and fear to open the door, to attack her grandmother's murderers with her quick feet and hands, but she knew that her end would be the same. With tears storming her cheeks, she squeezed through the window after Gannelwen. Her sister's eyes were wild with fear as she clutched her hand. Which direction was safest to flee?
Just a child, Tauriel thought. She's just a child, and so am I.
"Atigat!"
The orcs shouted. She pulled her sister with her, dashing as swift as Vana through the shade of the towering trees.
"Thrak mag at kri!"
She had been too young then to know what the pale orc had bellowed. Now she understood and could never forget.
Their hulking shapes sprinted after them amid the growing tongues of flame. The smoke billowed into the canopy, a black spire that obscured the stars. Tauriel couldn't see her parents—neither of them were warriors. Her father had run from the dwelling with his sharpest carpentry blade. Her mother was the one who had set the fire to alert the other clans of attack.
The orcs were gaining. Tauriel knew they could not outrun them. She saw it in the shivering glow of the light cast over Gannelwen's face that she did as well.
"Climb!"
They scrabbled up the trees, raking their hands against bark and taking the branches two and more at a time.
The pale orc with the slash in its face drew close. It bared its teeth and grinned up at them like a death's head, torch blazing in its hand.
"Shigog na bal."
I t threw it at the base of the tree.
Tauriel's heart pounded. There were two trees that neighbored on either side of them—the one that was nearest was too far.
"We must leap to the next!" Gannelwen cried.
"No—it is too far."
"What can we do? They will burn us!"
"We may be able to jump as the tree is felled, but not before. Do not think to—Ganna, stop!"
Her sister dropped her clutch at the foot of the branch she stood on and ran and flung herself from its edge as if she would take wing.
"NO!"
A scream that was from far away pierced her ears. For an eternal moment Tauriel thought she was wrong and that her sister had judged the distance correctly; that the tree was much closer than she guessed, that Ganna would grasp the edge of its furthest jutting branch and pull herself to refuge.
But she did not.
The scream she heard was her own. She choked on her cries. Her throat burned as if it had already caught fire before the rest of her.
The orcs howled with fiendish delight. Their shrieks erupted into the night. The pale orc that set the tree ablaze stalked over to where its prize had fallen and lifted its sword to sever proof of victory. She looked away.
A stray arrow whizzed by and struck into the bark above her head.
The smoke thickened. All had broken into chaos. More arrows flew and hurtled through the air true to their targets. Tauriel could barely make out the figures of elves and fleeing orcs. Thranduil's guard had arrived.
It was too late. Tauriel could do nothing but watch as the flames rose and engulfed the tree she was trapped in, blinded by tears and smoke.
Another arrow sang out and met the space above her head. This time something thin and taut was attached. She felt dizzy. She tried to focus in the direction the arrow had come from and squinted to see through the suffocating veil of black.
A youngling elf, older than her but not yet grown—watched her from one of the high branches of the second closest tree.
He was very beautiful. Silver-haired and dressed in the finest armor she had ever seen; a sliver of moonlight descended from the sky. Tauriel thought he was a vision. He couldn't be real. Surely she had succumbed, consumed by fire; her burnt remains stuffed into the pale orc's sack along with her sister's head.
She ignored him at first. She was dead and blackened and he was alive—laughing with the moon and stars. What could the living want with the dead save but to mock their plight?
His voice cut through the smoke—the sound like rain on her burning skin.
"Take the rope!"
Real, she thought. He's real.
Her lungs filled with hot ash. Her arms trembled. She fought to keep her eyes open. They were stinging with ash. She wanted to claw and grasp above her head where the arrow and rope was, but her body would no longer obey. The beautiful elf said something else but she no longer knew what it was.
As her eyes fell closed, arms encircled her. There was the sense that she was flying, plummeting, falling to the earth like Gannelwen had fallen.
Days later, after Tauriel began to heal and had regained consciousness, she was told she was the sole survivor of her clan; her mother, father, grandmother, and sister had all been killed in the first orc raid in three centuries.
When she could think of anything beyond the endless vision of her sister dropping like a stone from the sky, and of the pale orc defiling her tiny body with its terrible sword—only then did she ask her healer who it was that had saved her.
"Prince Legolas of course," she had said with kindness, though there had been pity in her eyes.
Legolas had saved her life that day. There were days Tauriel knew that he saved her still.
She readied herself and slipped on her tunic, breastplate and gauntlets. Some of the strength she had felt the previous day began to resurface, the dreams of grief behind for the moment—ebbing for now only to return with the tide.
Thranduil's candor yesterday had unsettled her. He was the King of Mirkwood and he had spoken of his speculation over his own son's regard for her with such casualty—such unquestioned belief in his depth of feeling that it had defied all she had thought to be truth.
He has grown very fond of you.
Many days—many marches of solitary years had seen Tauriel aloof from the world, unburdened by connection. She had waited all that time to hear confirmation of this hope. Yet never in all of her foolish imaginings had she guessed that if the possibility existed, it would be uttered by the king rather than his son.
Do not give him hope where there is none.
Legolas' face appeared before her again as it had when he was a child—the softness of youth losing its foothold to the hastening step of adulthood.
You shall know the greatest of loves. Pain…sacrifice…and love.
Her grandmother had died before she could live to see whether or not her predictions for Tauriel's life would unfold. She had died never seeing the arrival of the orcs who had viciously ended her own. Adanethael had died; and so had her mother, father, and sister. Her talented, shining sister Gannelwen, who had been destined to be a dancer in Thranduil's halls.
She no longer believed in fate.
When she arrived in the dungeons it was quiet. The stillness in the air signaled all of the life that occupied its cells had yet to stir.
The young guard who stood sentry looked as if he had been carried away with a bottle of Dorwinion wine the night before and was ready to fall down with exhaustion. Tauriel relieved him of his post and took over; she would reprimand him for it later.
She made her rounds and kept her step as light as possible while looking in on her sleeping prisoners.
A sound came from behind her—a pebble disturbed, bits of crumbling rock slipping into darkness. She stopped and listened. Nothing.
She sighed. The dream always rattled her for days after, and with the bluster she was now being forced to handle because of those dwarves—
A gust of air swept past her on the bridge. She nearly lost her footing. The muted echo of running footsteps reverberated off of the dungeon's cavernous ceiling.
"Who goes there?" She shouted.
When there was no answer, Tauriel drew her bow and ran in the direction of the retreating footsteps.
There again—she heard them clearly, could see ahead of her as bits of rubble skittered off the narrow bridge. But she could not make out her quarry. She ran on. After an indeterminate time had passed, and gradually coming to suspect that the only chase she was giving was to shadows, she grudged defeat. Whatever it was had eluded her.
Perhaps it was a rodent, she thought. The possibility seemed unlikely.
Tauriel returned to her post. She had covered much ground in her pursuit. When she made it back her prisoners were already awake, if they hadn't already been awoken by the sounds of her echoing shout and footfalls.
"Good morning, Captain," a voice greeted.
Kili tilted his head and regarded her as if she were one of the most fascinating things he'd seen all morning. Judging from the lack of visual stimulation in the dungeons, Tauriel supposed she was.
"When's breakfast?"
"Another guard will be here to attend you for that," she said crisply.
"I see now why you elves stay so thin," he grumbled. "If that gruel we received for supper last night was anything to go on."
She frowned. She had better things to do than stand here and discuss the subtleties of prison fare with a dwarf.
"Wait! I know your name—Tauriel, isn't it?"
It surprised her. He looked pleased with himself.
"Yes...how did you know?"
"I overheard that elf say it. The ladyish-looking one. "
Valar, if you're listening.
She sighed. "That was not a 'ladyish elf.' That was Prince Legolas."
Kili wrinkled his nose. "Oh, that's who it was? Hard to tell under those cheekbones."
Tauriel's frown deepened. "If that is all—"
"What does it mean?"
She stopped.
"Your name—what's it's meaning?"
The dwarf—Kili—seemed in earnest.
"Why do you wish to know?" she asked, wary.
"To talk," he said.
"We are talking."
"Well, yes, but—you know—to talk. To get to know each other."
"Why would we wish to do that?"
"Oh, for—nevermind."
Tauriel felt her frown evaporate like fog. Even more astonishing, she found herself biting back a smile as she left for patrols.
She returned later that evening and went to his cell.
"Daughter of the forest," she said.
Kili paused in his ministrations. He was scratching pictures with his nail in the dirt floor of the cell. One image looked like it was meant to be a pony or a pregnant warg.
"What?"
"You asked me what my name meant. It means 'daughter of the forest.'"
His brow creased. He seemed to digest the sound of it. The patchwork of hair that clung to his lower jaw could not seem to decide whether or not to become a beard.
"Why did you decide to tell me?"
Tauriel lowered her eyes. Truthfully, she did not know why she had given into the impulse to satisfy the dwarf's prying; he was her prisoner, and she had never before been tempted into exchanging information with one. So she answered him as simply and honestly as she could, feeling herself poised to jump from some great height to what she could not see below.
"Because you asked."
Notes:
Translations:
Sindarin (Elvish)
Adaeinior: familial term of endearment. A play on combining Adanethael's name and the Sindarin word for "grandmother."br /
Gannelwen: Tauriel's sister. A Sindarin occupational name denoting the female form for "dancer."br /
Nessa: (as quoted from the Tolkien Gateway) "Nessa was a Valië. She was the wife of Tulkas and sister of Oromë. Nessa was noted for her speed, fast like an arrow, able to outrun the deer who follow her in the wild, and also for her dancing ability, as she danced on the ever-green lawns of Valimar."br /
hên: (child)br /
Lle naa belegohtar: (you will be a great warrior)
Black Speech (Orcish)
Atigat! (there)br /
Thrak mag at kri! (go, kill them)br /
Shigo na bal (taste flames)
Well, there's another chapter. I hope you enjoyed it. As promised, this fic is finished and shall be updated every other week. If you would like to see more, and sooner, you must comment and review!
And yes, Kili is a terrible artist. But we love him anyway. ~_+
