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It was blackberry season. A time to be warm, and lazy, and playful. To sing to the dragonflies over the water, and laugh at the tumbling dances of tiny squirrels. Greenwood the Great had wrapped itself in bright leaves, and its trees and paths teemed with life. In the dew-wet morning, Thranduil had called his eldest son Lelvorn and his guard-captain Gladgaer, and proposed a hunt.
Gladgaer had welcomed the excursion, welcomed still more Lelvorn's pleasure in it. It was pleasing, strange, to watch them father and son together. Away from heavy robes, they had the same stance, if not the same coloring. The king's bright hair shone in sunlight, but Gladgaer watched the light change each strand of Lelvorn's honey-mouse tresses to pure honey, and grinned to be caught staring. When the shadows lengthened, Lelvorn's fingers trailed up the tips of Gladgaer's ears, and ambushed him between branches.
They were days distant from the woodland halls when things turned. Something in the forest voice that pulled first Thranduil, then Lelvorn to a halt.
Fleeing birds sang sightings of a cold drake, slunk down over the mountains to hunt the Greenwood. Following that first smoke, from the north came the sounds of fighting. Cries.
Dragon.
Mottled and dark, yes, but this is no cold drake. Its wings beat evil testament enough, even were it not for the wisps of smoke that carry above the trees, and the smell of char that rises from it now. And in the clearing created now by its mutilation, it is hunting halflings.
Had they delayed, the perian would have been slain, all, and devoured. But they were too few, and ill equipped to fight a dragon. This was a hunting party, half patrol and half for sport, provisioned to run light through the trees, and armoured with little more than leather. He had buckled Lelvorn's armour himself, before their departure; had allowed his prince - his lover, his friend - to help him in turn. They had stolen an embrace in the height of a tall oak, and used the vantage to spot the recent tracks of deer. They had laughed.
And then the birds had come. The stupid birds, Lelvorn swore, who couldn't tell a cold drake from a fire drake even when the forest was burning around their feathery heads.
An arrow, piercing the membrane of its right wing so that the attempt to fly had torn it wide. The dragon had screamed. Flailed, with all its working limbs, and the fire of its anger, breaking the forest about them. Gladgaer saw Thranduil block a burning branch with his forearm, the metal bracer turning aside the thickest part of the wood but unable to catch the length that splintered and snapped, still alight, to break in gouging devastation across the side of his face.
Lelvorn caught the dragon in its spin, its own momentum driving his long knife into the muscle of its flank before tearing it from his grip, still embedded deep. His face, on seeing his father fall, hovers close and painful in Gladgaer's mind's eye. Neither of them had known if Thranduil would rise.
Gladgaer had pulled their people back, drawing the halflings with them, while Lelvorn went to his father. When Thranduil stood, for a moment it had seemed his face was gone.
They ran. Eastward, bringing the perian further from their homes, outright carrying those who could not run. Not all had survived. Lelvorn had hoped the dragon might likewise retreat, return to its own hunting grounds. But the wyrm was angry. Wounded now. Grounded. And persistent.
And so they have run now, elf and halfling alike, for near two days.
The leader of the perian is one Rudy Fallohide, son of Rodolphus, of the settlement on the Greenwood's western edge. They are well enough companions, in this headlong flight. They know how to move among the trees, quick and silent, they leave a lesser trail to follow, and hide better than some elves Gladgaer has known. But they are mortal, and need food and rest, and both are in short supply, for they cannot stop to hunt.
The dragon tracks by scent.
Rudy and his party share food readily, even when scarce, and Thranduil accepts the offered scone with all diplomacy, slips it smoothly into Lelvorn's hands to make its way to Gladgaer's, and return to the communal stores in concealment. He cannot eat. Even water wets the bandage full through the ruin of his cheek. And they are still far from home.
They move at ground level, all save their scouts, for though the perian -if pressed- will climb they cannot walk the paths along the branches. Lelvorn runs at his father's left, guarding the blind spot where white linen wraps Thranduil's left cheek from brow to jaw. Gladgaer runs at his king's right, where naught but the edge of white bandage shows.
If Gladgaer is right, if their hunting party was a chance for Thranduil to assess his guard captain and his son together, it has at least proved an exhaustive test.
A thousand years ago Gladgaer was not old enough to go to the siege-grounds, but he remembers the return. Oropher King gone, and Thranduil bright and battle-tested and weary, but not like this. Gladgaer does not mistake the look of Thranduil's countenance, the set of his mouth, the burning- burned- desire to remain and fight and lay waste. Lelvorn presses a canteen into his father's grip and Gladgaer watches that rage leash itself once more. He is not eased.
He seeks to ease Lelvorn instead, in the stolen moments before the light returns and they must run once more.
"He is strong. It will heal."
"He is. It may. But, oh-" Gladgaer holds his own doubts close, and digs his thumbs into the space behind Lelvorn's shoulder blades, working his way up until his lover's neck lolls back against his hands.
They reach the mountain river in the height of the day. The dragon has been in earshot, gaining ground, since the second hour after dawn. By the time they cross, even the halflings' ears are pricked. Gladgaer is last, and steps onto the bank as Thranduil and Lelvorn end a tense, gestured conversation. Lelvorn steps back, and Gladgaer takes his place beside him.
At the river edge, Thranduil kneels, shaking his hair back from his face, where the bandages weep pale fluid over drying blood, in an awful trail down his neck. One of the halflings swallows audibly.
Thranduil strips his gloves, sinks bare fingers into the silted bank, and sings. The words, which should be distorted by the ruin of his cheek, slide from his tongue in twists of power, until the air vibrates as with the plucking of a giant's lute, the voice of the deep forest answering the will of the king. Beneath his fingers the watercourse churns, and ripples chase outwards: both downstream and up, against the current.
Gladgaer grip finds Lelvorn's elbow. He can feel the shiver that moves through him, before Lelvorn answers the question he has not asked.
"He is poisoning the water. With dreams."
Lelvorn's shiver has found its way to Gladgaer's spine.
In slow, measured advance, the dragon emerges from the tree. Wing and hind limb still hang, wounded, but it moves still with hunting purpose.
"You await me, little elves, little man-children. Fear is a spice. Lhûgosp will taste your deathss." It's voice is vile, hissing. Slaver glistens, jewel-like, in the broken sunbeams, and drips in long strands to the ground. Thranduil gestures the archers to hold.
Great claws, gouged and worn, the nail beds stained dark, disappear beneath the water. Black scales immerse themselves with a hiss of heat, a rising steam. The dragon takes one more step, and sways, long neck bending like a reed.
"You-" The hateful glint of its eyes flashes brighter and its jaws flicker orange, but beneath the water its forelegs stumble, and the beast's head arcs beneath the surface of the stream, thrashing up again in a spray of dark water. Lhûgosp snaps at the air, the light behind its jaws gone out. Instead the great maw seems to grin at them, eyes unfocused, unseeing. Falling closed. Slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat, torn wings droop, tail slumps, and the beast's hind legs give way. The trees shudder.
Already depleted quivers run empty as elf and halfling alike fire on the downed wyrm. Even the perian's arrows bite deep. With each impact, each trailing of blood across its hide to vanish in rivulets into the water, the only movement is that of the stream itself. The dragon's forelimbs are shadows beneath the water but its great head drifts sideways with the current, grinning its pleasure in death, anchored by the remaining bulk of its body on the bank.
Lelvorn raises his hand, and the hunters lower their bows. One final perian shaft finds its mark. In the quiet, Gladgaer watches the steam on the water- the boiling bubbles have abated. The dragon no longer breathes.
Gladgaer touches two shoulders and points them towards the rope-bridge tree. "Verify. Do not touch the water."
Lelvorn's hand is on Thranduil's side, Gladgaer watches it heave as he strives for breath. On the far shore, Mieleth walks down the dragon's spine to its drifting head and sinks her long knife into each eye socket in turn. Several of the halflings cheer, Rudy among them. Gladgaer rather likes them.
Thranduil does not rise of his own strength, but he does rise, and walk, though Gladgaer marks how heavily he weighs on Lelvorn's shoulder. The road is clear, and hearth and hall and healing ahead.
Behind them, the mountain river flows, and sings its new song of drowning dreams.
In the damp heat of afternoon, the Greenwood smells of blackberries.