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Thranduil had always wanted a child.
If not always, then for a time so long only the oldest trees remembered it to have been different once.
To have lost his own father had pained him beyond words, yet the love which had almost ripped his heart in two that day, was a feeling he wanted to share with a child of himself.
And so, when finally their son was born on the most beautiful spring day Thranduil would ever know, he and Glóriniava, his wife, were overjoyed.
They named the little boy after the beauty he was born into: Legolas, which could be translated to Greenleaf – the hopeful promise of a joyous and prosperous life, unbothered by any possible weight.
Glóriniava laughed when her husband proposed the idea, and her voice sounded as clear as a bell. “You think it time to break traditions, I see”, she smiled and agreed it was a beautiful name.
The mentioned traditions were referring to the couple’s own names, since they both bore seasons in them: Thranduil had been named the Sindarin “Vigorous Spring”, and Glóriniava “Golden Autumn”.
Carefully, she leaned forward to caress her son’s rosy cheek, and her beautiful, long, light red-gold hair flowed across her shoulders, embedding her features in the memory of soft sunrises.
Thranduil, who was holding their child in his arms, could barely lift his eyes from the little perfect face with its shut eyes. Was Legolas asleep or did he find it too exhausting to open them? What would their colour turn out to be, once he could use them to see the wonderous world surrounding him? Would he once share his mother’s astonishing hair colour, or come more after his father?
“Is he not lovely, meleth nín?”
It took a moment for Thranduil to find an answer. When he did, it came out unusually gentle and quiet. “Words cannot describe my love for him, dear.”
When the sun had set and Glóriniava had fallen into a deep sleep after the exhaustions of the day, Thranduil was standing on a small, hidden balcony that overlooked the treetops and offered a view accordingly beautiful to be seen for the very first time by this land’s newborn prince.
For a while, he took to wordlessly cradling his little boy, sparing the beauty spreading below him little to no attention, for the beauty within his arms was infinitely more meaningful to him. At last, Legolas fidgeted in his father’s warm embrace, opening his mouth to utter a few unformed sounds, and Thranduil’s heart leaped high in his chest.
“I vow to love and protect you for as long as there is life in my bones”, he muttered, and Legolas stilled at the sound of the fond and already familiar voice. “May your life be lit by the brightest of suns, for mine will always be, now that I have you in it, pîn meleth nín.”
And for the first time since his son’s birth, Thranduil could lift his gaze from the beloved tiny face, and he looked up to find a glistening star he had never seen shining this brightly before rise above the horizon.