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Chapter Text

From the private journals of Galion, who served three kings, survived one too many sieges, and learned that history is what happens while the important people are looking the other way.

The fire in the hearth had burned low, but the young elf across from Galion made no move to stir it. His head was bent in that particular stillness of one turning over heavy thoughts. The story of the princess’s sickness and her rise as the Sunlight-star had settled in the room like smoke.

Galion relit his pipe, the brief flare illuminating the deep lines of his face. “So she became our dawn,” he said, the words a quiet conclusion to the last tale. “But a dawn in a world where the night was learning new tricks. The peace—the long, sleepy watch we had known—it was ending. You could feel it in the stones of Menegroth, a chill no hearth could chase away. And our Amaryn… she felt it sharper than most.”

He took a long, slow draw.

“She grew, of course. From the girl who mended flowers into a young woman who could make a hall fall silent just by walking into it. Oh, she was beautiful. Not like her sister—Lúthien’s beauty was a song that broke your heart. Amaryn’s was like… holding a piece of the sun. It warmed you, but you knew deep down you couldn’t truly hold it. It was too fierce. She wore her hair in braids so complex they were like maps of forgotten constellations, and she had these eyes… violet, like twilight just before the stars pierce through. Old eyes.”

The younger elf finally stirred. “Did she know? The danger coming?”

“Know?” Galion chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. “She listened. While the lords in their polished robes spoke of honor and borders in the high court, Amaryn was in the lower halls, with the weavers and the gardeners and the guards coming off the night watch. They had loose tongues around her. She heard the real words: ‘fire in the north,’ ‘shadows that moved wrong,’ ‘a cold that stuck in the lungs.’ She heard of the Noldor princes dying in a place called Dorthonion. She heard of a tower falling to a thing called Sauron.”

He pointed the stem of his pipe at his listener.

“And she changed. The gentle light took on an edge. You’d see her in the healing wards, but she wasn’t just soothing fevers anymore. She was organizing supplies, learning which herbs fought poison, her voice calm but leaving no room for question. She was preparing. It was in that time, with the shadow knocking at our very door, that he first truly saw her. Not the symbol. The person.”

A genuine smile touched Galion’s lips.

“It was on the training grounds. Young Lord Thranduil was there—all sharp angles and sharper judgment, even then. And he was about to learn a lesson about our princess that no amount of swordplay could teach him…”

The world within the Girdle of Melian was a dream of perpetual twilight, but Amaryn’s day began in the absolute dark. The first light in her chamber wasn't the sun—an impossibility deep under the living rock of Menegroth—but the cool, blue-white glow of a large moonstone set into the wall. Its illumination was soft, directionless, and unforgiving. It showed every flaw, which was why she preferred it. In this light, there were no gentle shadows to hide in. It was the light of truth, and in it, she built her lie.

Seated before a polished silver mirror that had once, in a past life, reflected a different frightened girl preparing for a different kind of court, she began with the hair. The celebrated silver-gold mane, a legacy of Thingol that on her carried a disquieting, warm undertone—like sunlight trapped in platinum—was less a feature and more a territory to be governed. It was thick, heavy, and possessed a will of its own. She had dismissed handmaidens from this task years ago. This ritual was private, a daily re-conquest. To allow another’s hands to shape her crown was to cede a piece of her sovereignty, and she had done enough of that for several lifetimes.

Her fingers, slender and strong, began their work with the ruthless efficiency of a general deploying troops. Starting at the left temple, she took three small sections, weaving them into a tight, flat braid that tracked the curve of her skull towards the back. She repeated the motion on the right. These were the anchor lines, the foundation. Then began the true work. From the mass of unbound hair, she drew more strands, integrating them into the foundational braids, building them outwards and backwards in a complex lattice of interlocking plaits. It was a style unseen in Doriath, something born of a mind that remembered intricate southern crowns and the severe, practical updos of women who had to keep their hair from being grabbed in a fight. It was defense disguised as decoration.

As the braids took shape, she opened a small ivory casket. Within, coiled like sleeping serpents, were fine chains of mithril, so delicate they seemed spun from starlight and breath. One by one, she wove them into the braids. Next came the crystals: tiny, flawless shards of clear quartz, each no larger than a teardrop. She placed them where they would catch and splinter any available light into faint, prismatic glimmers around her head—a self-contained aurora. The weight was considerable. It pulled at her scalp, a constant, steadying reminder. You are wearing your armor. You are carrying your throne.

As her hands worked their silent, familiar war, her eyes in the mirror watched the transformation. The face that emerged from the framework of braids was one that still, on certain tired mornings, gave her a jolt of dislocation. The bones were too perfect, the skin too smooth, an agelessness that felt less like a blessing and more like a sentence. The high cheekbones, the sculpted mouth, the arch of eyebrows—all were achingly, flawlessly Elven, a masterpiece of the Song. But the eyes… The eyes were the open door, the crack in the masterpiece. Clear, luminous violet, the ancient and hauntingly beautiful signature of House Targaryen. They were windows to a person who had lived there too long, who remembered draughty stone halls and the scent of dragon. In them, you could sometimes catch a glimpse of the Dragonstone wind, or the shadow of an Iron Throne that would not exist for millennia, or the chilling emptiness of a son’s bedside.

“They stare,” she murmured to her reflection, her voice the only human sound in the room. It was a flat statement of fact. “They stared then, they stare now.” The object of the stare had changed, but its weight was the same. In King’s Landing, it had been a naked calculation: Is she strong? Is she weak? A prize or a threat? How can I use her? Here, in the everlasting, sighing twilight of Doriath, the stares were simpler, drenched in a kind of reverent awe that was somehow more isolating. They saw the Sun-maiden, the daughter of a Maia, a living marvel from a song. They did not see the furnace of old anger, the cinders of betrayal, the cold, heavy dread of history repeating like a bad jest. They saw a portrait of radiant, untouchable peace. She was the girl trapped inside it, hammering on the glass.

A ghost of a memory surfaced, unbidden: Alicent Hightower, in the early days, helping her with a necklace, their fingers brushing. A smile that seemed genuine. The memory was followed instantly by the phantom scent of blood and wildfire, the feel of a crown turning to ash on her brow. Her hands, poised in her hair, trembled for a single second. Then they fisted, the knuckles whitening. Never again. Trust is the mortar they use to build your prison.

Rising, she moved to the carved wardrobe of fragrant lebethron wood. Gowns hung there, silent and waiting, each a work of art in silk, velvet, and gossamer-thin linen. The palette of Doriath was a symphony of twilight and deep earth: silver-grey like fish scales in a dark stream, deep forest green, midnight blue, the purple of bruised dusk. She ran her fingers over them like a general inspecting uniforms before selecting today’s battle dress: a gown of pale, pearlescent grey, the colour of a dove’s breast or a morning fog. It was deceptively simple in cut, long-sleeved and high-necked, its elegance severe and modest. The armor, however, was in the lining. As she slipped it on, she felt the familiar, defiant slide of crimson silk against her skin, from wrist to ankle. The hidden flame. Only she would know it was there, a secret tribute, a grounding thread to the self that screamed and bled and burned. A Targaryen sigil in a land without heraldry, a splash of blood beneath a pristine bandage.

Finally, the rings. She slid them onto her slender fingers with practiced ease. First, the heavy band of polished obsidian, cool and dense. For the dragon-glass that could kill the cold ones, for the protective walls she could never quite build high enough. Next, a silver ring set with a small, perfect amethyst, the colour of a twilight sky in her old home, the colour of her own gaze—for the house she could not name, for the blood that sang in her veins alone. Then, the band of white gold with its milky, swirling moonstone. For Aemma. For the gentle mother lost to the brutality of succession. For the sons she had buried, their faces sometimes blurring with the faces of Joffrey and Viserys in her darkest dreams. And last, a simple, sleek band of pure mithril, unadorned. For clarity. For the cold, sharp focus she needs to survive this world.

With each one, she recited a silent vow: Remember. Endure. Protect.

A final, sweeping look in the mirror. The portrait was complete. Amaryn Aurëthil, Princess of Doriath, stood in serene, untouchable perfection. The light from the moonstone caressed the crystals in her hair, making her seem to glow from within. The dove-grey gown promised purity and peace. The girl from the reflection, the one with the old eyes, allowed a faint, bitter twist of a smile to touch her lips. Armor on, she thought, the old battle cry of a heart long scarred. Court awaits.

Her emergence from the royal quarters was like the moon rising from behind a cliff—a slow, inevitable revelation that commanded the sky. A soft, visible wave of attention followed her as she glided through the soaring cavern halls of Menegroth. The murmur of conversation would dip, then resume at a slightly higher, more animated pitch. She moved with the innate, fluid grace of the Eldar, but there was a subtle difference—a measured quality to her step, the posture of one accustomed to walking on daises, not forest paths. She acknowledged the stares with slight, graceful inclinations of her head, a curve of the lips that was warmth without intimacy, a blessing bestowed from a gentle distance. Her destination was never the grand throne room first. That was for the portrait. Her true work began in the warren of smaller chambers, natural grottos, and sunken gardens near the kitchens and the craftsmen’s quarters, where the true, sweaty, humming lifeblood of the Hidden Kingdom flowed.

Here, below the crystalline chandeliers and lofty tapestries, the air was rich with the smell of baking bread, forging metal, dye vats, and crushed herbs. Here, the stares changed. The awe remained, but it was tempered by a genuine, uncomplicated affection that never failed to send a pang of confused guilt through her.

“Good morning, my lady! The sun’s in your hair today!” called Baran, a kind-looking elf with forearms dusted in white flour, sliding a long peel laden with golden-crusted loaves from a stone oven. The heat of the hearth flushed his face, and the smell was profoundly, comfortingly real—a smell that transcended worlds. Not human, she corrected herself, watching the steam rise. Elven. But the same principle. Toil. Sustenance. The alchemy of flour, water, and fire to keep a people fed. It was a noble magic, far more honest than any she possessed.

“The smell alone is a blessing, Baran,” she replied, her voice losing its formal, crystalline chill, warming like the air around the ovens. “You’ll make the guard fat, slow, and terribly happy. A dangerous combination for our defenses.”

He laughed, a booming sound that echoed off the vaulted kitchen ceiling. “Let the march-wardens stay lean! These are for the little ones and the weavers with the sharp eyes!”

She passed on, her smile lingering. In the healing wards, a series of calm, mossy grottos lit by luminous fungi, she was not a princess but a pair of capable hands and a quiet student. She sat on a low stool beside Nesta, an elderly healer whose face was a map of gentle lines and whose eyes were the colour of a deep, still forest pool. Together, they rolled bundles of clean linen into tight bandages. The task was meditative, repetitive.

“The athelas is thriving in the southern grotto,” Nesta said, her voice a soft rasp. “But the woundwort is weak. The soil is too sweet there. It prefers a bitter touch.”

“Like some people I’ve known,” Amaryn murmured, earning a dry chuckle from Nesta.

“Aye. We must transplant it. It’s a stubborn herb, but its will to live is strong. It just needs the right hardship.”

Amaryn nodded, absorbing the herbal lore, but also the rhythm of the place—the quiet moans from the cots where elves lay with hunting injuries or the strange, wasting melancholy that sometimes took them, the soft, firm instructions of the healers, the scent of antiseptic crushed herbs and clean water. It was so different from the Red Keep’s maesters, with their politics, their secretive potions locked in towers, their chains of office that seemed less about knowledge and more about hierarchy. Here, healing was communal, a shared craft. The “smallfolk” of Doriath, she reflected, winding another bandage, were not small at all. They were the roots of the great tree, wide-spread and deep-delving. They lived with a security, a lack of existential fear, that the commoners of Westeros could never have dreamed of. No one here whispered of starving through a winter because a lord hoarded grain, or of being trampled in the mud during a tourney meant for royal amusement. Their burdens were physical, their sorrows personal, not systemic. A part of her, the part that had been Heir to the Seven Kingdoms, ached with a sharp, guilty envy. This is what peace can build. This is what a realm should be. This is the dream I was meant to shepherd. The other part, Rhaenyra the realist, the ghost at this green feast, whispered back: It is a greenhouse flower. Beautiful. Fragile. Grown under a magic glass. The first hard frost, the first real hammer-blow from outside, will shatter the glass and kill it all.

Her afternoon often took her to the weavers’ galleries, a vast cavern where the clack-clack-clack of a hundred looms created a rhythmic, industrious song. Light fell in great shafts from cleverly carved light-wells above, illuminating floating motes of thread and dust. Her friend, Elara, daughter of Captain Mablung of the march-wardens, waved her over. Elara’s fingers flew like birds, her loom alive with emerging colours—the silver of Telperion, the gold of Laurelin.

“You’re brooding,” Elara said without looking up from her shuttle, her tone light and familiar. “It makes your light flicker. Bad for my colours. I’m trying to capture divine radiance, not the glimmer of a troubled pond.”

Amaryn smiled, a real one that reached her eyes and made the violet in them deepen. “I am contemplating the structural integrity of Telperion’s leaves. Your warp tension is off on the left side. The leaf will droop in a century.”

Elara laughed, a bright, clear sound that cut through the loom-clatter. “See? Brooding. Only you, Amaryn, would critique the Holy Trees of Valinor from a technical, textile standpoint.” She leaned closer, her playful expression sobering. “My father returned from the northern perimeter last night. He came to our quarters, not the barracks. He looked… grim. Didn’t speak much, just stared at the fire. He said the wind from the north smells wrong. Not of pine and snow. It carries a tang. Like ash.”

The smile vanished from Amaryn’s face as if wiped away. The serene mask of the princess settled back into place, but behind the amethyst eyes, the machinery of Rhaenyra’s mind—the mind that had planned troop deployments and grain shipments and dragon patrols—whirred to cold, calculating life. Ash on the wind. Not a metaphor for decay. A literal report. Particulate matter from combustion. Large-scale combustion. “Did he say from where? A forest fire? The Noldor’s forges?” Her voice was calm, too calm.

Elara shook her head, her earlier mirth gone. “Just that it’s a new thing. A stain on the air. He said it’s coming from beyond the Pass of Aglon.”

Aglon. The eastern pass. Held by the sons of Fëanor. If ash was drifting from there, carried on prevailing winds… it meant something in their direction was burning, and burning big. Her stomach tightened with a cold, familiar clutch. It was the feeling she’d had when the first raven arrived from Dragonstone about the Gullet, when the Triarchy’s sails were spotted. The first visible sign of the spreading stain, the confirmation that the peace was not just fragile, but already broken.

She placed a hand on Elara’s shoulder, a gesture of thanks and reassurance she did not fully feel. “Tell him to breathe shallow when on watch. Ash is bad for the lungs.” It was a healer’s advice, mundane and practical, masking the alarm clanging in her soul.

Seeking a different kind of intelligence, she drifted later to a small courtyard garden where the herbalists grew their rarer specimens. There, she found old Galion, not among his wine casks for once, but supervising two younger servants as they wrestled a new, enormous clay pot of flowering nightshade into position. He stood with his hands on his hips, a critical eye on their efforts.

“Master Galion,” she said, feigning interest in a spray of night-blooming jasmine. “Your domain expands. I hope the shadows here are as kind to your vintages as your cellars.”

He turned, and his shrewd eyes met her violet ones. He didn’t speak for a moment, his gaze holding hers in a silent appraisal that felt heavier than any courtier’s stare. He was weighing her, she realized. Weighing her right to know, her capacity to understand. Finally, he gave a slow nod.

“Aye, my lady. The shadows are deep here. But it’s the wind I’m mindful of.” He gestured vaguely northwards. “Grown acrid, of late. Not a good smell for wine. Taints the bouquet. Or for much else.” He paused, then added, his voice dropping, “The lads on the high watch platforms, the ones with the keenest eyes… they mutter. About a glow. On the northern horizon, on cloudy nights. A dull, red glow. Not starlight. Not the Lights of the North.” He tapped the side of the clay pot, the thud hollow and final. “Best to ensure one’s stores are in order. For a long winter. And to know which roots are poisonous, and which just look like it.”

It was not confirmation. It was something more valuable, more adult: a shared understanding. I know you know. I see you listening. And I am telling you, in the language of cellars and gardens, that it is worse than you think. Prepare.

That evening, long after the false twilight of the great halls had dimmed, Amaryn stood on the high, open balcony of her chamber. She looked at the beautiful, clustered talans of Menegroth and the bioluminescent forests of Doriath, then north, towards the invisible, looming wall of the Echoriath, towards the hidden, cursed plain of Angband. The Girdle of Melian shimmered at the edge of perception, a wall of woven melody and divine will. For the first time, it did not feel like a shelter. It felt like a lid on a pot that was beginning to simmer, the first bubbles of a boil about to erupt.

She thought of Baran’s flour-dusted smile, of Nesta’s worn hands, of Elara’s laughter amid the looms. She thought of the warm, safe bustle of the Hidden Kingdom, a kingdom of song and craft and growing things. Then she thought of the acrid wind, the red glow on the horizon, the grim set of a march-warden captain’s shoulders. Ash. Fire. Glow.

The dread that settled in her chest was a physical weight, a dragon of ice coiling around her heart. War, she knew with the certainty of one who had been its cause, its instrument, and its victim, was not a cliff one fell from. It was a slope, greased with pride, fear, and stubbornness. Once a realm began to slide, it seldom stopped until it hit the very bottom, broken and bleeding, all its beauty scorched away.

Her hand rose, finding the moonstone ring on her finger. She turned it, the smooth stone cool against her skin. The portrait of Amaryn Aurëthil, she thought, looking down at her own grey-clad form, was beautiful. It was beloved. But portraits were static. They were illusions of permanence. They could not wield a sword, could not stock a granary, and could not prepare for the fire that consumed canvas and flesh alike.

The girl inside the frame, the one with the old eyes and the older, scarred soul, knew the time for passive radiance was ending. To protect this greenhouse peace, she would have to step out of the beautiful, fragile portrait and learn, once more, how to make war.

The first sign was a silence. A silence that fell over the great, vaulted throne room of Menegroth like a suffocating blanket. It followed the entrance of the march-warden, Captain Mablung. He was not bloodied, but he wore a mantle of dust and cold air that smelled of a world turned to cinders—a scent of scorched pine, melted stone, and something deeply, fundamentally wrong. He did not kneel with his usual solemn grace, but stood as if braced against a gale, his gaze fixed on King Thingol.

The court, a glittering sea of silver and shadow, held its breath. Amaryn stood near a pillar carved with images of the first awakening by Cuiviénen, her dove-grey gown blending with the stone. She felt the shift in the air as a physical chill, a drop in pressure that made her heart beat within her chest. This was not a report of orc-kin skirmishing at the edges of the Girdle, nor the tragic tale of a hunter lost to spiders. This was the end of something. The cracking of the world’s spine.

“Speak, Mablung of the Heavy Hand,” Thingol’s voice rang out, colder and harder than the bedrock beneath them. “What news from beyond the twilight?”

Mablung’s voice was a gravelly thing, stripped of all music. “The Siege is broken, my lord.”

A collective, sharp inhalation hissed through the hall, the sound of a hundred lungs seizing at once. Amaryn’s fingers tightened on the cool pillar, the carved stars of Elbereth biting into her palm. Siege. The word, so abstract, so distant in her life here—a tale of Noldorin pride and folly—now landed with the weight of a falling mountain. The leaguer of the Noldor. The great, arrogant, necessary cage around the North. Broken.

“How?” Thingol demanded, the single word cracking like a whip.

“Fire,” Mablung said, the word flat and final. “Rivers of it, born of the mountains themselves. The very earth split and vomited flame. It drowned the highlands, my lord. The grasslands of Ard-galen are a sea of glass and ash.” He paused, swallowing. “The forces of the Enemy came upon its tide. Orcs in numbers beyond counting. Wolves with eyes of coal. And… dragons. Winged serpents of scale and flame were seen in the ash-clouds.” Another pause, longer, the names sticking in his throat like bones. “The lords Angrod and Aegnor of the House of Finarfin… they held the heights of Dorthonion. They are slain. The land… it drinks no more light. It is a twisted wood under a perpetual night. Taur-nu-Fuin, they name it. The Forest Under Night.”

Angrod. Aegnor. Finarfin’s sons. Brothers to Galadriel. She had seen them once, years ago, visiting Finrod. They had seemed like forces of nature themselves, tall and bright and laughing, their armor seeming less like metal and more like captured daylight. Now, they were gone. Extinguished. Just like that. The casual brutality of it, the sheer, annihilating scale, stole the air from her lungs. This wasn't like the political violence of Westeros—the dagger in the dark, the poisoned cup, the staged accident. This was a genocide of light. It was the Conqueror’s field of fire, but unleashed by a devil, not a king, and with a scope that made Aegon’s wrath look like a hearth-blaze.

“The Pass of Aglon is forced,” Mablung continued relentlessly, painting a map of ruin with his words. “Himring stands, a rock in a foul tide, but the eastern realms are overrun. Maglor’s Gap is lost. Hithlum is besieged, though Fingon holds fast. The leaguer… is dust. The fences are down. The wolves are in the field.”

The silence that followed was thick. It was the sound of a worldview shattering. The Noldor, with all their pride and power and fierce, terrible oaths, had been the buffer, the great, angry, bleeding wall between Doriath and the North. That wall was now rubble. The illusion of safety, nurtured for centuries within the Girdle—the belief that the darkness was a tale for beyond the mountains—evaporated like morning mist under a desert sun. The cold truth seeped into the ornate hall: they were no longer hidden. They were next.

Amaryn’s gaze lifted from Mablung’s ash-pale face to her father’s. Thingol sat upon his great throne of intertwined roots, his face a mask of starlit marble. But in his eyes, she saw it: the deep, kingly fury, and beneath that, a sliver of something that might have been fear. His long fingers gripped the arms of the throne until the knuckles were white as moon-pale birch. He knows, she thought. He knows what this means. But what will he do?

Her own mind, however, did not freeze. It clicked into a different place, a memory—the gears of a ruler who had just seen her borders collapse, who had watched the Velaryon fleet burn in the Gullet. Rivers of fire. The picture painted itself in her mind with a painful clarity. Doriath was no longer a sheltered realm. It was an island in a rising sea of shadow. The enemy had the initiative, the momentum, overwhelming force, and terror for a weapon.

And her father’s response? To sit. To hold. To trust in the Girdle. To repeat the mistakes of every besieged lord who believed walls alone were enough.

A silent, furious scream built in her chest. You cannot just hide! The thought was so visceral it was nearly a shout that echoed in the vaults of her soul. The Girdle is a wall, but walls can be besieged, can be starved, can be corrupted from within by despair! Do you not see? The world is burning, and we are tending our garden! We are Viserys at the council table, debating precedents while Otto Hightower steals the kingdom one decree at a time! She thought of her first father, kind and weak, letting the green poison drip into his court, believing peace could be maintained through willful blindness, through the sheer force of his desire for it. It was the same paralysis. The same fatal, noble mistake of believing that because you did not wish for a fight, the fight would not come for you.

She watched Thingol dismiss Mablung with a curt gesture, his voice ordering the reinforcement of all patrols, the closing of minor gates, the doubling of the watch on the Girdle’s weaving. It was a defensive move. Prudent, perhaps. But not enough. It was a gambit of fear, not strength. We should be sending runners to Hithlum, offering aid. We should be treating with the dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost, securing their steel and their stout axes. We should be forging alliances, sharing intelligence, creating a new, flexible line of defense with every free people left standing, not shrinking behind our magic and praying it holds. But she was not the king. She was Arassiel, the second daughter, the sun-maiden, a creature of light and song, not counsel. Her opinion on military strategy would be met with a pat on the head, a sad smile, and a reminder to focus on her hymns and her healing. Her voice was meant to soothe, not to strategize.

The court began to dissolve into frantic, hushed whispers, a hive struck by a stone. The elegant masks of the nobles had slipped, revealing naked fear beneath. Amaryn turned and walked away, her steps measured, her face a calm lake over a raging undertow. She did not go to her chambers. She went to her garden. She needed to touch soil, something real, something that could be managed.

Her sun-meadow, once a place of private joy and gentle power, now felt like a command tent. She stood amidst the fragrant herbs and stubborn elanor, but she did not see beauty. She saw inventory. She saw supply lines. She saw vulnerability. The shaft of sunlight from above felt like a target.

She knelt, the soft earth cool through the fabric of her gown. Her hands, usually so gentle with the living things, now worked with a healer’s ruthless efficiency. She began to harvest in bulk with a grim focus. Kingsfoil, for wound-cleaning and fever-breaking. Willow bark, for pain. Comfrey root, for knitting bone. Henbane and poppy, for the sleep of the mortally wounded. She worked in silence, her mind a whirlwind of lists and projections.

How many wounded can we expect if the Girdle is tested? Not skirmishes—a real assault. How many if it falls? How much linen for bandages? We need to request more from the weavers, set aside a stockpile they cannot touch for festival gowns. How many clean water sources do we have that cannot be poisoned from outside? The underground springs. We must map and guard them. Salt for preservation. Needles and gut for stitching. Boiled water for cleansing. The questions came rapid-fire, the ghost of a Master of Coin and a wartime queen working in tandem. The beauty of the place, the delicate play of light through the cavern’s opening, felt like a taunt. A pretty backdrop for a coming tragedy. Her own celebrated beauty felt equally absurd—a finely carved, jeweled goblet in a fortress preparing for a siege. Useless. A distraction. A liability.

“Amaryn?”

She started, her hand closing convulsively around a bunch of athelas. Elara stood at the edge of the clearing, her usual playful expression vanished, replaced by a pallor that made her freckles stand out like dust on snow. In her hands, she twisted a length of unfinished embroidery thread.

“Elara.” Amaryn forced her grip to relax, laying the herbs carefully in her basket. “You heard.”

“Everyone has heard.” Elara’s voice was small. “My father… he’s been summoned to the northern fences. He kissed my mother like… as he did before the Wolf-hunt of Nan Dungortheb.” She took a step closer. “You’re gathering medicines.”

“I am taking stock,” Amaryn corrected gently, but the correction was a deflection. “We must be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” Elara’s whisper was edged with a tremor. “The Girdle has held for ages. It will hold now. Won’t it?”

Amaryn looked at her friend—truly looked. She saw not a fellow daughter of the Eldar, but a girl on the cusp of womanhood, her world defined by the loom, her father’s stories, and the safe rhythms of the Hidden Kingdom. She saw, with a painful lurch, Rhaena and Baela after Laena’s death—confused, afraid, putting on brave faces. I cannot give her empty comfort. But I cannot shatter her either.

“The Girdle is the will of the Queen,” Amaryn said slowly, choosing her words like stepping stones across a torrent. “It is the strongest magic in Beleriand. But strength is not just a wall, Elara. It is also the heart behind it. The preparedness. The will to endure if the wall is… tested.” She picked up a sprig of kingsfoil. “This is a small strength. But many small strengths, gathered with purpose, can make a people very hard to break. We prepare not because we believe we will fall, but so that we may prove we cannot be broken.”

It was a speech. A good one. It felt true, even to her. Elara’s shoulders lost some of their tension. She nodded, swallowing hard. “Can I help?”

“Yes,” Amaryn said, relief a quiet bloom in her chest. “Go to the weavers’ hall. Speak to your mistress. Tell her… tell her the Princess Amaryn respectfully requests that a portion of the next linen batch, and any scraps, be set aside for the healing wards. For bandages. Frame it as a project of royal patronage, if you must. But secure it.”

It was a task. A purpose. Elara’s eyes focused, the fear momentarily displaced by duty. She nodded again, more firmly, and hurried off.

Amaryn returned to her work, but the solitude was broken. A figure appeared next, this one with a presence that stilled the very air. Melian.

“You prepare for a storm, my daughter,” her mother said, her voice neither approving nor disapproving. It was an observation, as one might note the gathering of clouds on the horizon of the mind.

Amaryn did not stop her work. “A storm has already come, mother. I am preparing for the flood that follows the thunder.” She snapped a stem of athelas with a crisp, definitive sound. “We rely on the Girdle. But what if one of our own is wounded beyond it? What if the shadow brings a sickness we cannot sing away? What if a siege lasts years? Medicine does not rely on will alone. It relies on preparation. On things.”

“And do you fear the Girdle will fail?” Melian’s question was soft, but it hung in the air between them like a challenge, a needle seeking the heart of her daughter’s turmoil.

Amaryn finally looked up, meeting her mother’s fathomless eyes, eyes that had seen the shaping of the world. “I fear that believing anything is unbreakable is the first step to breaking it.” It was the voice of Rhaenyra Targaryen, who had seen the supposed unbreakable loyalty of houses crumble to dust, who had watched a father’s love shatter against ambition, who had learned that every throne, no matter how solid, had cracks. “I will not be caught unprepared again.”

Melian watched her for a long moment, her gaze seeing through skin and bone to the churning spirit within—the ancient grief, the strategic coldness, the defiant fire. Then she gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. “Then prepare, Amaryn. Gather your small strengths. But do not let the shadow you fear become the root in your own heart. A healer whose hands are clenched in fear cannot feel the wound.”

When her father found her there later, she was bundling dried herbs with twine, her movements sure. Thingol looked older, the weight of the day’s news etched in new lines around his eyes that no starlight could erase. He watched her for a moment, this daughter who was suddenly a stranger of grim purpose amidst the flowers.

“The world darkens,” he said, his voice heavy as stone. “We must hold our light closer. We must become like Menegroth itself—turned inward, our beauty and strength hidden deep.”

Amaryn tied off a bundle and set it neatly atop a growing pile. “Light needs fuel to burn, Father. And a shielded flame can still be smothered by lack of air.” She stood, brushing soil from her skirts. An idea, half-formed and desperate, solidified into unshakable resolve. She could not command armies. She could not sway the council. But she would not be a passive jewel in a locked chest, waiting to be plundered. “I will continue and expand my work with the healers. We are stockpiling supplies. And…” she met his gaze, her violet eyes steady, unblinking. “I will learn archery.”

Thingol blinked, truly caught off guard. “Archery? Amaryn, you are a princess of the Sindar. The march-wardens are our shield and bow. Your place is—”

“—wherever I can be of use,” she finished, her tone polite but unyielding as ironwood. “If the darkness finds a crack, I would not be a liability, to be shielded and protected, draining resources. I would be another set of eyes on a wall. Another hand that can defend a corridor, or hunt game for the pot if it comes to that. It is a practical skill. Like herb-lore. Like weaving.” It was a logic he could not easily refute without sounding negligent, without admitting the threat might be so great that even his daughter needed to know how to kill.

He stared at her, seeing the fierce, unsettling resolve in her eyes—the same hard glint in his own eyes. He saw Melian’s acceptance in her stance. Finally, he sighed, a sound of weary concession to a new, grim reality. “If it will ease your mind and make you feel… more secure… see to it. I will speak to the captain of the guards. Discreetly. It will be private tuition.”

It was a victory, small and hard-won, bought with the currency of shared fear. She inclined her head. “Thank you, my lord.”

The change in her appearance was gradual but decisive, a silent manifesto. The next morning, the intricate, time-consuming lattice of braids—the crown of the sun-maiden—was gone. Her hair, that celebrated silver-gold cascade, was instead woven into a single, thick, severe plait that fell down her back like a rope of spun metal, or was coiled tightly and pinned at the nape of her neck. It was efficient. It stayed out of the way. It said utility, not ornament. The delicate mithril chains and light-catching crystals were carefully packed away in the ivory casket. They were for a world at peace.

From her collection of rings, she removed all but one. The amethyst for her house, the moonstone for her lost mothers, the mithril for clarity—they were placed in a small velvet pouch. Only the heavy band of polished obsidian remained. Its dark, glassy weight on her finger was a constant, cool reminder: dragon-glass, protection, a shield against the cold ones, a weapon against the dark. It was not pretty. It was a tool. A ward. A piece of armor.

The hidden crimson lining of her gowns remained. Some habits, some defiances, were too deeply rooted to discard. They were the last, secret spark of a different fire in a world that was now too full of the wrong kind of flame; a promise to herself that beneath the practical Sindarin grey, she was still, inextinguishably, a daughter of dragon’s blood.

She began her archery lessons in a secluded, echoing underground range used for training the palace guard. Her instructor, Tirin, was a silent, patient Sinda with eyes the color of flint and hands scarred by bowstring and blade. He asked no questions of his princess, offered no praise, only precise, quiet corrections. “Your shoulder is tense. It will pull the shot left.” “Your breath should stop, not your heart.” Her first shots were terrible, the bow a stubborn, rebellious thing in hands accustomed to needles and herbs. The string bruised her inner arm, leaving a purple smudge that felt like a badge of beginning. But she applied the same relentless focus she used for her braids or her herbal catalogues. She listened, she adjusted, she repeated. The twang of the bowstring and the thud of arrows hitting straw became a new, grim rhythm in her days, a percussive counterpoint to the softer sounds of the looms and the herb-grinding mortars.

News from outside continued to trickle in, a slow, cold drip of dread. Through Galion, through guards with loose lips, she learned more. Of Finrod Felagund, trapped far from his underground realm, saved by a Man named Barahir. A ring given, Galion had muttered, polishing a goblet to a nervous shine. A debt of life. That is a powerful thread woven. Men remember such debts. She stored the information: Finrod lived. An alliance with Edain was forged. A thread of hope, thin but strong.

Refugees, few and shattered, were sometimes granted hesitant sanctuary at the very edges of the Girdle. Their tales were of apocalypse: of a sun blackened by smoke, of rivers running hot, of a cold that crept into the heart. The Sun-maiden was still beloved, but now when the people saw her—her simple plait, her focused eyes that scanned the heights of the caverns as if assessing defensive points, the singular, dark shield-ring on her hand—they did not just see a symbol of light. They saw a preparation for night. They saw one of their own girding herself, and in her grim purpose, they found a strange, sobering comfort. The portrait of untouchable serenity was gone, replaced by a living testament to a new reality. The most beautiful flower in the garden was the one digging a trench around its roots. Amaryn Aurëthil was no longer just a princess. She was the first and most determined soldier in a kingdom that refused, with all its heart, to admit it was now at war.

The news of the Sudden Flame had been a cold horror. The news that came a year later was a lightning strike to the soul.

It arrived on the hushed, awestruck lips of a young minstrel just returned from the western marches, where he had traded songs with a Noldorin loremaster. The tale spread through Menegroth like a shockwave, bypassing the throne room entirely, flowing through the kitchens, the gardens, the weaver’s halls, carried on a breath of pure, undiluted myth.

Fingolfin. The High King of the Noldor. Had ridden alone. To the very gates of Angband. Had challenged Morgoth. The Dark Lord himself. To single combat.

Amaryn first heard it in snatches as she organized her stockpiled herbs in a side-cavern she’d commandeered as a storeroom. “…seven wounds…” “…the Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld…” “…thrice he was crushed down, and thrice he rose again…” “…the Eagles of Manwë…”

She stopped, a bundle of dried yarrow frozen in her hands. A part of her mind, the Rhaenyra-part, initially scoffed. A suicide. A grand, theatrical, useless gesture. What does it gain? What ground does it hold? It is the act of a leader who has abandoned strategy for despair. But the words kept coming, painting a horrifyingly familiar picture.

“…he hewed the foot of the Dark Lord…” “…his cry echoed in the mountains…” “…they say the waters of Sirion fled from the thunder of their duel…”

Slowly, she set the yarrow down. A strange, tight feeling was building in her chest, behind her chest. It was a terrifying, resonant understanding. She saw it. Not as a Sindarin princess safe behind a Girdle, but as a Targaryen. She saw the furious, glorious, doomed ride. She saw the pride that could not bear to watch its people suffer without answer. She saw the despair that curdles into a final, defiant rage. She saw the need to look your destroyer in the eye and mark him, even as he broke you.

He was a fool, she thought, walking numbly from the storeroom, the whispers following her. A magnificent, prideful, reckless fool.

And then, unbidden, a ghost whispered back in the corridors of her memory, in a voice of smoke and velvet: “They fear you… because you are a dragon.”

Daemon.

The tightness in her chest became a physical ache. Daemon, who had flown Caraxes into the heart of the Triarchy fleet for her. Daemon, who had chosen a death amidst God’s Eye’s fire over a life in a world where she was gone. A grand, theatrical, useless gesture? Or was it the only gesture left when the world had narrowed to a point of absolute loss? Fingolfin had ridden to his doom for his people’s despair. Daemon had flown to his for hers. Not for strategy. For fury. For love. For the dragon’s need to burn together or not at all.

He was a fool, she thought again, but the thought had changed. It was heavy, sodden with a grief she had never allowed herself to fully examine. But he was my fool. My terrible, beautiful fool. And I sent him to his death as surely as Fingolfin’s people sent him to his.

She found herself moving away from the heart of the city, drawn by a need for solitude that was almost violent. She passed through familiar groves and glades, her feet carrying her on a path less traveled, to a place where the forest grew thick and silent, and the Girdle’s melody was a faint hum at the edge of hearing. It was a place of dark earth and tangled roots, where sunlight rarely fell directly. A place of shadows.

Here, she stopped. The air was still. The awe and horror of the tale coiled inside her, a live wire. Fingolfin’s wrath was not of her kin, but it was of her kind. It was the wrath of a king who had lost everything. It was the fire of a spirit that would rather shatter against the enemy than slowly dim behind walls. It was the same fire that had smoldered in her since her rebirth, that she had feared, had hidden, had channeled only into warmth and growth.

But fire was not just for healing. Fire cleansed. Fire destroyed. Fire marked.

A trembling began in her hands. She looked down at them—the healer’s hands, now calloused from the bowstring. They had only ever given life. What if they could also take it? What if the Solar Song had another verse?

A deep, ragged breath filled her lungs. She focused not on the living moss at her feet, but on a patch of bare, dark soil between two gnarled roots. She reached for the core of herself, for the memory of Dragonstone’s heart, for the phantom sensation of Syrax’s inner furnace, for the blinding rage of the betrayal on the Gullet. She pulled it all up—the love, the loss, the fury—and she shaped it into a single, silent, focused note in her mind.

A beam of concentrated, white-gold light, thin as a needle and hotter than any forge, lanced from her outstretched palm. It incinerated.

The soil fused into a black, glassy slag in the span of a heartbeat. A wisp of acrid smoke curled up. The roots on either side were seared, their bark cracking with a sound like miniature lightning. The air shimmered with blistering heat.

Amaryn jerked her hand back, staggering as the connection broke. She stared at the result. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum. The destructive potential she had feared was no longer potential. It was a fact. She had wielded it. And a part of her, a deep, dark, shameful part, had thrilled at the release. At the absolute, unquestionable power of it.

The thrill was instantly drowned in a wave of nauseating guilt. She looked from the scorched, ugly scar on the forest floor to her own unmarked hands. She was a healer. She was supposed to mend, not mar. This was the power of the Enemy, of the fire that had drowned Ard-galen. Was this her true nature? Not the sun that nourishes, but the wildfire that consumes?

But Fingolfin’s cry seemed to echo in the silent wood. To mark the enemy. To say: I was here. I defied you. You are not unscathed.

Was it so different? His sword, her light. Both were weapons. Both could be used in defense, in defiance. The issue was not the fire, but the hand that wielded it. And the heart that guided the hand.

Her knees felt weak. She sank down onto an unburned root, the cool, living bark a shock against her skin. She buried her face in her hands, the obsidian ring cool against her forehead. The ghosts crowded in.

She saw Daemon’s face, not in the rage of battle, but in the quiet of the Dragonstone council chamber, his gaze on her, fierce and possessive and utterly committed. A monster, perhaps. Her monster. Her consort. Her family. The father of sons she would never hold again. The man who had understood the cost of the throne because he had always burned with the same inner fire. Dragons were always meant to burn together. And they had, in the end, burned everything—their enemies, their allies, their children, each other. It was the Targaryen doom. Was it now hers, transplanted to this ageless land?

“A fool,” she whispered into the quiet dark, her voice choked. “You were a glorious, stupid, beautiful fool. And I loved you for it. And I am here, and you are dust, and the world is still dark.”

The grief was not clean. It was a tangled knot of sorrow for Fingolfin, a king she never knew; of aching, unresolved longing for Daemon; of terror at the power within herself; and a grim, solidifying respect for the act itself. In a world of strategic retreats and hidden kingdoms, Fingolfin had chosen to make a stand. A final, hopeless, unforgettable stand. It was a song of such devastating courage that it would be remembered as long as the mountains stood.

She looked again at the small, glassy scar she had made. A mark. A tiny, personal defiance. She had not challenged a god today. But she had confronted the god within herself—the capacity for destruction that was the twin to her gift for creation.

She stood, her legs steadier now. The guilt remained, but it was joined by something else: a cold, clear acceptance. The sun could scorch as well as nurture. To only ever use one half of its nature was a lie. To protect her greenhouse kingdom, she might need to learn how to wield the drought, not just the rain. She might need to be able to scorch the earth before an advancing army, to blind enemies with her light, to wield heat as a weapon.

She was not Fingolfin. She would not make his ride. But she understood the fury that drove it. And in understanding, she felt a terrifying kinship with the fallen High King, and with the memory of the Rogue Prince who had shared her fire. They had all, in their way, chosen to burn rather than fade.

Walking back towards the lights of Menegroth, she felt older. The simple plait of hair felt heavier. The shield-ring on her finger was a reminder of the obsidian daggers of Dragonstone, of the hard, cutting edge one must sometimes wield. The sun-maiden had looked into the heart of her own flame and seen a dragon staring back. And she knew, with a sorrow as deep as the foundations of the world, that to save the light she loved, she might have to learn to let it burn.

The dread that had settled over Doriath like a fine ash after the Sudden Flame now congealed into something solid, cold, and named. It was no longer a distant fire or a fallen king’s fury. It had a geography and a master.

The news of the fall of Minas Tirith reached Menegroth as a creeping chill. It was in the way the march-wardens returning from the western fences would not meet anyone’s eyes. It was in the new, grim set of Mablung’s jaw. The great tower of Finrod Felagund, the shining guard on the island of Tol Sirion, had fallen. Not to armies storming its walls, but to sorcery. Its master, the Lord Orodreth, was driven out. And in his place, from the corrupted stones, now ruled Sauron, lieutenant of Morgoth.

The name itself was a poison. Sauron. Tol Sirion was now Tol-in-Gaurhoth—the Isle of Werewolves. The key to the river Sirion, the central artery of Beleriand, was now a festering lock held by the enemy.

In Menegroth, the mood shifted from anxious vigilance to a locked-door anxiety. The Girdle, once perceived as a gentle mist of protection, was now discussed in hushed tones as a final, fragile barrier. Conversations in the court ceased to be about when the shadow would recede, and began to be about if the Girdle would hold. The laughter of children in the lower halls seemed quieter, as if sound itself feared to travel too far and attract attention.

For Amaryn, the abstraction of war vanished entirely. This was no longer a report of a far-off battlefield. Sauron was, in the parlance of her old life, a Hand of the King—an Otto Hightower with black magic at his disposal, consolidating power within striking distance of her borders. The strategic picture was horrifyingly clear: Doriath was now flanked. The Sirion, a potential avenue for retreat or supply, was compromised. They were in a siege that had not yet been formally declared.

This clarity burned away the last vestiges of passive dread. It ignited a cold, focused energy. She could not raise levies. She could not command troops. But she could do what any intelligent ruler facing a smarter, more powerful enemy must do: she could learn. She could build an arsenal not of swords, but of information.

Her nocturnal visits to the library became a nightly campaign. The delicate, fearful princess was gone. In her place was a shadow with a lantern, moving through the towering shelves with purpose. She sought out maps—not the beautiful, illuminated things in the throne room showing idealized forests, but the practical charts used by scouts and wardens. She unrolled a great hide map of the River Sirion’s course, her fingers tracing from its headwaters in the far north, down past the now-cursed island, and south towards the sea.

Here. This is where he sits. A choke point. He controls all traffic, all messages. He isolates the southern realms from the north. He splits the continent. Her mind, trained on the geography of Westeros and the importance of the Gullet, saw it instantly. It was a masterstroke of geopolitical malice. She compared Sauron, in her mind, not to the blunt instrument of Morgoth, but to Otto Hightower—a patient, cunning manipulator who used position and perception as weapons. But Otto had never commanded werewolves or sung down towers.

She moved from maps to bestiaries. She studied accounts, often fragmentary and terrified, of the Enemy’s creatures. Werewolves. Not mere large wolves, but spirits of malice in bestial form. Their weakness? She found only myths and contradictions. She read of the Necromancer—a title sometimes whispered in the same breath as Sauron. The art of binding and breaking spirits. It made her think of the Others, of a cold that killed and then raised what it killed. But this was a shadow of fire and dominion, not ice.

As she read, the ghost of her past failures sat beside her, a silent, accusing scholar. You had a kingdom. You had dragons. You had sons. And you lost them. You failed to protect them because you were too busy fighting for a chair, reacting to your enemies, not understanding them. The guilt was a sharp stone in her gut. Here, she had no throne to fight for. She had people. A sister. Parents, however distant they felt. A baker who smiled, a weaver who laughed, an apprentice who trusted her. She had failed the smallfolk of King’s Landing, letting them riot and starve while she played the game. She would not fail these people. Knowledge was her first line of defense this time. To protect, she must first understand the nature of the threat.

One night, she was so engrossed in a crumbling scroll on early Arda shadow-philosophies that she didn’t hear the soft footsteps until they were almost upon her. She looked up, a flicker of alarm instantly soothed into warmth.

Lúthien stood at the edge of the lantern’s pool of light, a vision in a gown of deep blue woven with patterns of nightingales. Her beauty was a shock, as always—not the radiant, solar shock of Amaryn’s, but something deeper, more sorrowful and profound, like the very essence of twilight given form. In her arms, she carried a small, carved wooden case.

“I thought I might find a ghost here,” Lúthien said, her voice the melody Amaryn’s would never be. “But I find a general surveying her maps.”

Amaryn managed a tired smile, pushing the scroll away. “No general. Just a student of unpleasant things.”

Lúthien glided forward and set the case on the table. It was a small harp, exquisitely made. “The darkness weighs on you, sister. It hardens your light. I brought music. It… remembers joy.”

It was a gesture of pure, loving compassion. The kind Amaryn had once craved and now found she could scarcely bear, because it felt like a bandage on a wound that needed stitches. She looked from the harp to Lúthien’s earnest, loving face, and felt a chasm open between them—affection.

“Thank you,” Amaryn said, her voice soft. “But joy feels like a memory of another age. What we need now are strong walls and sharp eyes.”

Lúthien tilted her head, her grey eyes searching Amaryn’s violet ones. “The heart is a wall, too. And song can sharpen the spirit as well as any whetstone. You prepare for a battle of bodies. Do not forget the battle for the soul. The shadow seeks to break that first.”

It was wise. Profoundly, divinely wise. And utterly, frustratingly insufficient to the pragmatic terror gnawing at Amaryn.

“I know,” Amaryn conceded, running a hand over the map of the Sirion. “But a broken soul can flee. A body with an arrow in it cannot. I must learn to stop the arrow.” The words came out blunter than she intended.

Lúthien’s gaze grew even more penetrating. “Is that what you do in the yards with Tirin? You learn to stop arrows?”

Amaryn met her eyes, no longer hiding it. “I learn to loose them.”

A long silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant drip of water in the caverns. Lúthien did not look shocked or disapproving. She looked… deeply sad. She saw her sister choosing a path that led away from the world of song and into the world of steel.

“My path is dance and dream,” Lúthien said finally, her hand resting on her harp. “Yours is… light and ledger. They are both born of love for this land. But they will lead us to different clearings in the same dark wood.”

The truth of it hung in the air, poignant and inescapable. They were the sun and the moon, yes. But now, in the gathering night, the moon’s path was one of gentle, revealing light, while the sun, trapped below the horizon, was preparing to forge its light into a weapon for the dawn that might never come.

Amaryn reached out and covered Lúthien’s hand with her own. The ink stain on her finger was a stark contrast against her sister’s flawless skin. “I would have you sing forever, Lúthien. I would have your dance never end. My path is to help ensure that it doesn’t. Even if it means my hands are never clean again.”

Lúthien turned her hand to clasp Amaryn’s, her grip surprisingly strong. “Then I shall sing for your hands, sister. I shall sing of the light that chooses to become a shield, though it longs only to be a warmth.” She paused, her star-like eyes holding Amaryn’s. “Promise me something. When the fear is upon you, when the numbers in your ledgers blur, you will come find me. Not for counsel. Just… to sit. In the moonlight. To remember what we are protecting.”

It was an offer of an anchor. A moment of peace in the coming storm. Looking into her sister’s face, Amaryn felt the hard, strategic shell around her heart crack just enough to let the love in.

“I promise,” she whispered, and meant it.

Later, under a rare shaft of true moonlight that found its way into a high, open gallery, they sat together in silence. Lúthien did not play her harp. They simply were. Amaryn, her head leaning against her sister’s shoulder, looked at the silver disc above and thought of a different promise, made on a different island, to a man of fire and chaos. I will protect them, Daemon, she thought, not to the ghost, but to the memory of her own resolve. This time, I will see the threat coming. This time, I will not fail the innocents. Even if I must become something harder and brighter than a princess to do it.

The moonlight bathed them both, but it seemed to cling to Lúthien, a natural mantle. On Amaryn, it looked like borrowed armor, cool and distant. The Sun-maiden and the Nightingale, bound by blood and a promise, already walking their divergent paths towards the same encroaching shadow.

The library of Menegroth at the deepest hour of the night was bathed in silence. The great, curving shelves of black birchwood, packed with scrolls and codices older than the sun, absorbed sound like a sponge. The only light came from faint, everlasting crystals set into the stone pillars, casting long, dancing shadows that made the shelves seem to breathe. It was a place for ghosts and scholars, and Amaryn was doing her best impression of both.

She had carved out a small fortress of knowledge at a heavy oak table in a secluded alcove. The "walls" were made of open scrolls and stacked books. The armory: a pot of ink, a scatter of sharpened quills, and her own racing mind. Before her lay the grim tools of her new trade: a detailed map of the Sirion watershed, a treatise on the symptoms of shadow-sickness, a ledger of Doriath’s last five harvests she’d practically smuggled out of the steward’s office, and a truly depressing Noldorin philosophical text on the nature of despair as a tactical weapon.

Her hair was in its severe, single plait, a rope of silver-gold coiled at the nape of her neck to keep it out of the ink. A smudge of that same ink darkened the heel of her left hand. She’d chewed absently on a strand of hair earlier, a terrible habit from a childhood centuries and lifetimes gone, and a few wisps had escaped to frame her face. She was, in the dim crystal-light, not the Sun-maiden. She was a commander surveying a map of a coming disaster, her brow furrowed, her violet eyes scanning numbers with the intensity of a hawk watching a field mouse.

Across the library, moving with the silent, sure-footed grace of one born to these halls, came Thranduil. The son of Oropher, a prince of the Sindar in all but the title, he was on a practical errand. His father, ever one to seek patterns in the ancient and celestial, wanted the most recent astrological charts concerning the corona of the ‘Steadfast Star’ (Menelmacar). It was the kind of semi-mystical busywork Thranduil tolerated but found faintly frustrating when there were actual wolves—were or otherwise—at the door.

He turned a corner into a narrower aisle, the scent of old parchment and cedar filling his senses, and stopped.

There she was.

Princess Amaryn Aurëthil. He knew her, of course. One did not live in Menegroth and not know of the king’s second daughter, the one with the startling eyes and the warmth that seemed to follow her like a personal season. He’d seen her across the throne room, a vision of serene, untouchable light, usually surrounded by a polite buffer of awe.

This… was not that.

His first thought was sheer cognitive dissonance. The Sun-maiden was hunched over ledgers like a guild accountant before tax season. Not that Elves even have taxes. His second thought, quicker and sharper, was to note the subjects of her study. The titles leaping out from the sprawl were not odes to Valinor or herbal compendiums. They were manuals of grim reality. Siegecraft. Logistics.

His curiosity, a beast he usually kept on a very short leash, stirred and lifted its head.

He didn’t announce himself. He became part of the shadow of a shelf, watching. He saw her cross-reference a figure from the harvest ledger with a population estimate scrawled in the margin of the Sirion map, her lips moving in silent calculation. He saw her make a note in a precise, rapid hand—‘If yield drops 10%, rationing must begin by Ivanneth, assuming no external supply.’ He saw her pause, rub her temple with an ink-stained finger, then absently—impatiently—tuck one of those escaped wisps of brilliant hair behind a delicately pointed ear. The gesture was utterly unselfconscious, devoid of any awareness of an audience. It was the gesture of someone who had forgotten they were a princess, who was simply a mind trying to solve a problem.

A strange, almost electric jolt went through him. I know that look. That was the look he saw on Captain Mablung’s face when planning a patrol route, or on his own father’s when assessing a rival lord’s weakness. It was the look of strategic engagement. Of thinking several moves ahead on a board where the penalties were measured in lives. But why was shewearing it?

The confusion was rapidly replaced by a sharpening, focused interest. This wasn’t idle curiosity or princely dabbling. This was… preparation. Systematic, detailed preparation for a catastrophe, most of the court still refused to name aloud. He felt a tug of recognition, as if he’d been speaking a complex, private language his whole life and had just heard an echo of it from an unexpected quarter.

He decided to test the echo.

He stepped out of the shadows, his soft-soled boots making no sound on the thick moss runner. He stopped a few feet from her table, a tall, lean silhouette in robes of deep forest green.

“An unusual curriculum for the Sun-maiden,” he said, his voice a low, calm baritone in the silence.

She jolted, a full-body flinch that was profoundly satisfying in its authenticity. Her head snapped up, those remarkable violet eyes wide for a second before the shutters came down. The serene, polite mask of Princess Arassiel slid over her features, smooth as poured cream. But he’d seen the crack. He’d seen the real person underneath, startled and brilliant and worried.

She followed his gaze to the open scroll before her, its title clear: ‘The Fall of Gondolin: A Structural Analysis of Defensive Failures.’

“I study how realms endure,” she said, her voice carefully modulated, the perfect, correct answer.

Thranduil didn’t smile. Smiling felt frivolous here, in this little temple to impending doom. He took a step closer, his eyes holding hers. “By learning how they fail,” he countered, his tone not challenging, but matter-of-fact, as if commenting on the weather.

“A clear-eyed approach. Most here prefer to believe failure is a concept for other peoples. For the… hasty Noldor.” He let his gaze flicker over her map, her notes. “You see the crack in the wall others pretend is just a trick of the light.”

He saw it then—a flicker in those amethyst depths. Not offense, but recognition. A spark of ‘You see it too.’ It was there and gone, buried under layers of caution, but he’d caught it.

Before she could formulate another careful, diplomatic response, a shuffling sound came from the aisle. A young elf with a slight limp—Rhosgal, one of the library apprentices—appeared, clutching a thick folio to his chest. He was so focused on his task that he didn’t even register Thranduil standing in the gloom.

“My lady!” Rhosgal said, his voice a hushed, relieved whisper. “You asked for the master ledger from the Royal Granary? The steward, he said it was restricted, but…” He hefted the folio onto the table edge with a soft thump. “I brought the monthly yield summaries from the last ten years. It’s almost the same data, just… not as pretty.”

The transformation in Amaryn was instantaneous and complete. The princess-mask shattered. Her whole face softened, lit from within by a warmth that had nothing to do with courtly grace. It was genuine, unguarded gratitude.

“Rhosgal,” she said, and her voice was different too—warmer, real. “You are an absolute treasure. This is perfect. Truly.” She reached out and touched the folio, not him, but the gesture was intimate in its appreciation. Then, leaning forward slightly, “How is your sister’s cough? Did the steam help?”

The apprentice flushed, a mix of pride and bashfulness. “Much better, my lady. She slept through the night. Mother says to thank you.”

“Good. Tell her to keep using it until the rattling is gone from her chest.”

Rhosgal bobbed his head, shot a fleeting, now-startled glance at Thranduil, and scurried back into the shadows like a rabbit.

The silence he left behind was different. Charged. Amaryn’s gaze returned to Thranduil, the warmth fading but not entirely gone, replaced by a wary, evaluating look. She was waiting for his reaction—for condescension, for a raised eyebrow at her familiarity with a lowly apprentice.

Thranduil found, to his own surprise, that he had no condescension to offer. He was… fascinated. Unsettled, even. In his world, rank was everything. Protocol was a language. One did not ask after a servant’s sister’s cough. One did not earn a look of such uncomplicated, relieved devotion from them. His interactions were transactions of duty and command. What he had just witnessed was a transaction of… trust. Practical, human trust. It contradicted every assumption he’d ever made about the radiant, remote princess. It suggested a whole hidden kingdom operating beneath the glittering surface of the court, one she ruled not by birthright, but by something else entirely.

The princess mask was back, but it was thinner now. Transparent. He could still see the strategist, the weary scholar, the woman who remembered servants’ families, right behind it.

“Your… preparations seem thorough,” he said at last, because he had to say something. He nodded toward the folio. “Granary yields. A prudent line of inquiry.”

“A boring one,” she replied, and was that a hint of dry wit in her tone? “But starvation is also rather boring. And terminal.”

A surprised, soft huff of air escaped him—not quite a laugh, but its close cousin. “A blunt assessment.”

“It’s a blunt world, my lord,” she said, and for the first time, she looked at him not as Princess to Lord, but as one pragmatist to another. “Or had you not noticed?”

He held that look for a long moment. Then, he inclined his head. Not the shallow, perfunctory nod of court, but a deeper, more genuine gesture of respect. It was for the mind, not the title.

“I will leave you to your blunt work, then,” he said, his own voice carrying a new, subtle warmth. “Do not let the shadows consume all your oil. Dawn, however grim, always comes.”

It was as close to ‘take care of yourself’ as his stiff, princely vocabulary would allow.

He turned to leave, his original mission for star-charts completely forgotten.

“Lord Thranduil,” her voice stopped him, softer now. He turned back. She wasn’t smiling, but the severe line of her mouth had softened. “The charts you seek… they’re two aisles over. The third shelf from the bottom. They were re-filed last week.”

He stared at her. She’d known what he was here for. She’d been aware of his presence, or had deduced it, even in her deep focus. And she was helping him.

Another puzzle piece clicked into place, adding to the fascinating, contradictory picture.

“My thanks,” he said, and this time, he did allow a very slight, very rare smile to touch his lips. “It seems I am not the only one with clear eyes in the dark.”

He walked away, the image of her—ink-stained, weary, brilliant, and kind—burned into his mind more vividly than any memory of her in silks and jewels. He wasn’t thinking of her beauty. He was thinking of her composition. The strategic mind, the hidden network of trust, the relentless focus, the dry, weary humor. It was a more captivating blueprint than any portrait.

At her table, Amaryn watched him go, the strange tension slowly leaving her shoulders. He hadn’t mocked her. He hadn’t patronized her. He’d understood the purpose of her grim scholarship. He’d seen the crack in the wall, and instead of pretending it wasn’t there, he’d merely noted its dimensions. And he hadn’t flinched at Rhosgal.

She looked down at her inked hands, at the maps of possible futures filled with fire and shadow. For the first time since the world began to darken, she didn’t feel entirely alone in seeing it. A spark, small but defiant, kindled in the cold, strategic place behind her ribs. It wasn’t hope. Not yet. It was the simple, profound relief of being seen.

Outside, the gathering gloom pressed against the Girdle of Melian. But in the heart of the Hidden Kingdom, in a pool of crystal light surrounded by tales of failure, a new alliance had been born. Not of politics or romance, but of shared perception. The stage was set in the honest dark where true things could finally be seen.

Galion tapped out his pipe, the cellar quiet but for the pop of the dying fire. Across from him, the youth sat, still as stone.

“So that was the start of it,” Galion said. “Not a song or a dance. A meeting in a library over grain counts and maps of fallen cities. Romantic, eh?”

The youth didn’t smile. “He saw her.”

“Aye. He saw the architect, not the portrait. And she, for a moment, let him.” Galion’s eyes grew distant. “It was a ‘click,’ my boy. Two puzzle pieces, lonely and strange, finding their edge matched. In a court of dreamers, they were the only two doing arithmetic in their heads. From that night, they had a silent partner in the long watch.”

He relit his pipe, the flame highlighting his eyes and the weight held behind his gaze. “It didn’t make the shadow outside any lighter. If anything, it made things harder. More to lose. They danced a careful dance of conversations about patrols that meant ‘I see you*’ and silences that said everything else.”

Galion fell quiet, the story spent. After a long moment, the young elf finally spoke.

“What happened next?”

A slow, knowing smile touched Galion’s lips. “Next, lad? Next comes the dragon. And nothing complicates a careful dance quite like a dragon.”