Avaleina could not help but notice Elrond continuously glancing in the direction that Eloissa had disappeared some time ago, eyes narrowed with concern, "She'll be alright."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," All three of the remaining wood elves answered at once.

"I know you mean that to be reassuring," Celeborn said in a carefully measured voice to keep the humor out of it, "But I must admit, after all of the things I have witnessed the four of you do to one another and insist the other was 'Alright', it now does the direct opposite of reassurance."

There was a thoughtful pause before Legolas, Avaleina and Farlen all burst out with contagious laughs, "Remember when we accidentally strung you up from that tree?" Avaleina asked Farlen, who let out a deflating wheeze of a laugh at the memory.

"You were alright," Legolas chuckled, "Eventually."

"I fared much better than you did when we dared you to fetch one thing or another from that ledge and the rocks crumbled beneath you halfway up."

Legolas stopped laughing briefly, eyes and mouth wide with surprise, "I completely forgot that occurred."

"Yeah! Probably!" Avaleina wiped a small tear that had leaked from her eye, "That's what happens when you fall headfirst down a cliffside. Frankly, you're lucky you remember your own name after that."

Farlen wiped one of his own tears, "Thranduil was so furious with us. It's the only time I halfway believed his threat to take us to the market in Dale and sell us to the first bidder."

"Speak for yourselves," Legolas scoffed at the other two, Lord's Elrond and Celeborn stood to the side watching, both briefly forgotten about.

"Oh, he was furious with you too." Ava assured, "You were simply unconscious and therefore blissfully unaware of his record holding tirade."

"I truly believe for a moment there, he turned entirely purple."

"I would have said it was more of a light maroon color."

"Either way, it was an inherently unhealthy color for a person's entire body to be."

"On that, we agree."

The three friends laughed together for a while longer before Elrond broke back into the conversation with a dignified throat clearing, "With all of that being said, are we sure that Eloissa is going to be alright?"

"Yes," Legolas, Avaleina, and Farlen said together once more in the same pitch and tone as the first time. They attempted to keep straight faces, but were unsuccessful and quickly dissolved into another fit of giggles.

Celeborn could not help but smile at the sound, how he had missed their company.

Ava recovered before the boys did, "She'll be alright, Elrond. Even though our woods are crawling with all manner of dark creatures, they rarely stray far from the branches for risk of the sun. There is very little anywhere nearby that would be able to threaten her, especially on such flat ground. The few sparse tree's around would warn her long in advance of any dark creatures or ill intent lurking around."

"And any other non-dark creatures around are either known to us, or we are known to them and they know better than to bother us." Legolas observed the lingering concern in Elrond's eyes and decided to add, "Besides, we're not a great distance from Beorn's house and the only other thing around more well known to leave alone, is Beorn."

Farlen rolled his eyes, "Don't mind her, she's always been a coward when it comes to doing anything that might be considered disobeying Thranduil and Ferdan."

"Is what you're doing disobeying Thranduil?" Celeborn asked with a raised eyebrow.

Legolas copied Celeborn's mannerism perfectly, "Any more so than we usually are when we come and visit with you?"

"Fair enough I suppose."

Elrond, who was significantly less comfortable and experienced with Thranduil being upset with him, shot Celeborn an incredulous look, "No, not fair enough! Is what you're doing disobeying Thranduil?"

The three younger elves made several noncommittal noises and hand gestures before Farlen spoke for the collective, "Not…directly."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Elrond pressed.

There were several more noncommittal and dismissive noises and gestures.

This time it was Avaleina who spoke for the Greenwood Collective, "Thranduil gave us permission to leave the forest and seek out the advice of friends about The Rot. I only gave him one or two specific names as to who I was going to ask and made it clear that it was likely I would ask others if they were there or a suitable opportunity presented itself. And then we got word that Elrond might have crossed the Misty Mountains into Lothlorien and thought," she lifted both hands up in an exaggerated shrug, "why not?"

Elrond mulled the words over, his head cocking gently to the side, "How did you know that I had crossed the Misty Mountain into Lothlorien?"

Legolas did not miss a beat with his reply, "A kingdom never reveals its secrets," accompanied with a wicked grin that always reminded Celeborn of a younger Thranduil when he was up to no good.

"When he and Ferdan inevitably find out about this," Celeborn said, "How much trouble do you think that you will be in?"

"It likely depends how successful we are, to be honest." Avaleina answered, "It's difficult to be angry with something that produced the first unique results in centuries."

Legolas pointed out, "It also depends on how funny Galion thinks the situation is. It's surprisingly difficult to be successful and angry about anything with him chortling and snickering in the corner."

Farlen pointed at him like he was a student who had answered a difficult question in class, "You're correct about that."

"You said that you had a way to get rid of it?" Elrond asked, "This 'Rot'"

The three of them exchanged glances, Legolas' voice and face bled dry of all its humor until the only thing left was grim "Not a pleasant one."

"An unpleasant way is better than no way at all." Celeborn said, finding himself somewhat regretting the decision to speak when Farlen leveled him with a glare.

"Until you've been through it," Farlen told Celeborn, "You don't get to have an opinion about it."

Successfully scolded, Celeborn found himself looking down towards his shoes, "That is fair enough."

"So far the only thing we have found that fully combats it, is to make our body's so full of light that it burns it out," Avaleina frowned at her own explanation, "We create an artificial fever for the artificial rot."

Elrond frowned a bit as he soaked in the information, "You say that it's an artificial rot? Artificial how?"

Both of the younger boys looked back towards Avaleina somewhat expectantly, she spoke slowly with a frown of thought on her face. "The rot…. It isn't a natural thing. It isn't a substance, or an infection."

She clamped her lips together until they were nothing more than a thin line and gently wiggle them back and forth, she released them again with a soft popping sound. Her green eyes flickered back over to Elrond, "It's more like a memory that our body cannot get rid of. Like a nightmare made more physical beneath our flesh, one that gathers together. And when it gathers…."

"It does," Elrond wasn't sure how to even begin to succinctly describe what he had just seen on Legolas arm, and so he just gestured vaguely to the area of the wound, "It does whatever in Morgoth's wildest dreams that is."

All three of them nodded grimly. Nearby Celeborn looked vaguely like he might actually be sick.

Elrond's heart shattered for them, he had heard of such things before. At least, he thought he had. The information hadn't been told to him, but to Maglor while he had feigned sleep nearby.

When he closed his eyes, Elrond could still smell the crisp winter air that had been filled with woodsmoke to cook a deer that had been shot earlier that day. Maedhros' sentences had been broken strings of at times barely coherent words when he'd described the kinds of lingering pains that still bothered him from his time in tortured captivity.

He could remember Meadhros' insistence that something 'wrong' still lingered underneath his skin, no matter what any healers said about the matter. Elrond wondered if perhaps Maedhros had stayed longer in his imprisonment if he would have also developed these dark and festering wounds.

Then he opened his eyes again, "That's horrible, I'm so sorry."

Farlen seemed to shrug off the verbal sympathy the same way he had to Celeborn's hand earlier, "It's a horrible world that we live in. Lots of horrible things happen in it."

This time, Celeborn seemed unable to hold in his laugh at the bristling comment, "You will not burst into flames if you occasionally accept the empathy of others."

"Perhaps not," Avaleina leaned her head against the shoulder on Legolas' uninjured side, voice a bit thicker than before, "But I might cry. It's been a particularly hard and gruesome and tiring and long few months and I'm too tired for unanticipated kindness. My body doesn't know what to do with it and it's uncertainty is about to come out in tears."

Even after a moments thought Elrond couldn't think of what sort of series of catastrophic events would have had to unfold in the past several months that could make their lives 'particularly hard and gruesome and tiring and long' considering the usual events that took place.

After another moment's thought, he decided he probably did not know what catastrophic events had occurred.

"Please don't make her cry," Farlen implored with more conviction than most could muster in times of their greatest need, "After she starts it's next to impossible to get her to stop. She'll cry at everything for the next two days."

Legolas shook his head at his friend, "Your empathy continues to astound."

"The rest of you have got it covered nicely, I think, " Farlen sniffed at the air suspiciously, "Can't have too much empathy or it starts to smell."

Elrond looked back to Avaleina and in an effort to diffuse some of his own discomfort asked, "You said that it's like a memory, how do you cure a memory?"

"You burn it out of your body, every part of it. You give the memory nowhere to hide. You make your body forget." She let out a small and not even half hearted laugh, "At least for a while anyways."

"I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you mean," Elrond frowned both in thought and silent apology.

Ava shrugged a little helplessly, "I'm not sure how else to describe it to you, unfortunately."

For the first time in a while Celeborn added to the conversation again if only for a fleeting moment in order to ask simply, "Do you, Legolas?"

Legolas shook his head in the negative, but still felt the need to verbally elaborate at least a little bit, "No idea, Avaleina is the only one here that's been able to successfully copy the treatment."

"If you're able to do the treatment," Elrond spoke slowly, like the ideas were all still falling into place in his mind, "Would you be able to show me the treatment, so I at least have an idea about what has been successful thus far? Something to go off of?"

Avaleina made an expression and soft grunt that bespoke of deep thought, while Legolas and Farlen exchanged mostly unreadable expressions between themselves. She thought about it for not an insignificant amount of time, the expression remaining on her face the entire time, while the rest of them continued to stand around in mutual respectful silence.

At least out loud, nobody was speaking. Elrond was still largely unclear about the specifics and the unspecifics about the communication that the elves of Greenwood the Great shared with one another. From what he'd gathered through a combination of observation, eavesdropping, and integrating Celebrian, Elrond knew that they were capable of communicating with each other telepathically.

He just did not know in what capacity that happened.

Finally Ava's expression changed and she looked back to Erlond instead of where she had been staring off into the vague distance, "I probably could."

"But?" Celeborn asked, sensing it lingering behind the rest of the words the same as Elrond.

"But the three of us would be gone longer than we'd planned to be."

Celeborn nodded with understanding, "How long does it usually take?"

"Depends how deep the rot as set in, depends how fast you channel and increase the light, depends on how many wounds the accumulation has come from. Amongst others."

"On average," Elrond clarified, patient as ever.

"Eh," Avaleina said, then wobbled her hand back and forth in front of her for good measure, "Two or three days? I guess?"

Legolas gave her an unconvinced and somewhat concerned look, "Two or three days, without the forest or Ada? What about that one time-"

"It will be fine, Legolas. I know what went wrong that time and it hasn't and won't happen again," to her credit the confidence in her tone matched the confidence of her words, "But to make you feel better, if we do it Halfway Point if anything were to happen the grove would be able to help me."

Legolas looked unconvinced, "Are you certain?"

Ava's tone didn't waver, "Is anybody ever certain of anything?"

"Yes," Farlen, who was born with exactly zero respect or appreciation for rhetorical questions, answered, "I'm always certain everytime that I get stung by a spider that I never want it to happen again. I'm certain that I'd rather remove all of my teeth and then bite my own arm off than re-do Ferdan warrior training all over again."

"It's the least painful of the two options, really," Legolas agreed.

Farlen continued without interruption or even pause, "I'm certain that ever lecture that we get from Thranduil is the longest lecture that he's ever given us-"

"Alright, I get it. Thank you."

"Excuse me, I'm not finished proving you wrong yet." Farlen said with a fairly convincing show of indignation, "I'm certain that everytime I wake up with a hangover, that this is going to be the one that kills me. I'm certain-"

Avaleina reached up to clamped her hands over his mouth to force the words to stop, to Elrond and Celeborn she said, "In order for us to do this safely," she faltered, "To do it safe-er there's still a few things we'll have to retrieve and arrangements to make before we begin."

Behind her hands, Farlen continued to mumble words incomprehensibly.

To just Celeborn she said, "Do you remember how to reach the Halfway Point?"

"Yes."

"We'll meet you there by sundown tomorrow at the latest?"

"We'll be there."

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and can't wait to hear what your favorite part was!