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Chapter Text

An excerpt from “Of Sun and Shadow: A Treatise on the Lost Queen of the Greenwood,” compiled by the loremaster Galion from oral histories, keeper of the King’s Wine and, by accident, of his secrets.

If you ask in the right corners of the Woodland Realm, where the older folk sit and the firelight is warm, they might tell you about the Queen.

Not many do anymore. But it begins, as always, with the dawn of a new era.

Her name was Amaryn. She was a princess of the old kingdom of Doriath, from the world’s morning. And from the moment she was born, they say she carried a kind of gentle heat with her. In the deep, echoing caves of Menegroth, where light came from gems and cool, glowing moss, she was different. Standing near her was like standing in a patch of sun. Her hair was the pale silver of our people, but when she moved through a real sunbeam, you could see gold in it, like honey in milk. Her eyes were the colour of twilight violets, and they held a sadness so deep and quiet it seemed less a mood and more a part of her, like the scent of rain on her skin.

Ah, yes. She was a mystery that one. You’d find her laughing with the potters, her hands grey with clay, or in the healing halls singing softly over a fevered child. The common folk loved her fiercely for it. Yet, in the King’s council, she was sharp as a honed blade. While the great lords spoke of history and honor, she’d ask about grain stores for the border guards, or the safety of the charcoal-burners in the north woods. She saw the kingdom as a body to be kept well, not just a crown to be polished. It made the high-born uneasy. They called her the Earth-Minded Princess, which was not meant kindly.

Suitors came, of course. Proud Elven lords and even bold Men, drawn by her light and her lineage, encouraged by the ever-famous story of her sister Lúhien and her beloved Beren. She was gracious to all, but she kept a distance. Her heart was a private garden, and the gate was latched.

Then, there was Thranduil.

He was a noble lord back then, solemn and steady as an ancient tree. Where she was sunlight, he was deep-rooted shadow. Their coming together wasn’t a song of sudden passion akin to Lúthien and Beren. Oh no, it was quite different. It was far quieter. When she looked at him, that constant sorrow in her eyes didn’t vanish, but it made room for something else. A peace. And his smiles, rare and slight, were saved for her alone.

When the darkness took Doriath, and we fled east to carve a new life from the Greenwood, they were our guides. Just as he was our strength, she was our breath. Because of her, the halls he built had high windows to chase the sun. Gardens were planted where only stone had been. She remembered every name, from the oldest warrior to the youngest kitchen maid. And for a little while, in this dark forest, we remembered what hope felt like.

Then, just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, dusk came, and she was gone.

The archives say, “Queen Amaryn fell in defense of the realm and its heir.” It sounds noble. It’s a clean, carved-stone lie.

The truth is softer and sharper. There was no battle. It was an ordinary day gone wrong. She was walking in the woods with her little boy, Legolas. Something slipped through the trees. Something that had no right to be there.

The King had been in a meeting, and the goblet in his hand burst. Not from a squeeze—the silver just… frosted and cracked, like the frozen surface of a pond in deep winter. He had looked at the shards, then at his palm, as if it belonged to someone else. Then he was gone. A blur of green and gold, moving faster than I’d ever seen an Elf move.

We found him in the Golden Glade. He was on his knees, holding her. He kept one hand over hers, the one resting curled and tender over her abdomen. He didn’t speak. He just folded around her, as if trying to shield a corpse from a blow that had already landed. When he finally looked up and saw the prince in the thorns, it was the first thing that broke through the ice in his eyes. It wasn't a gaze of relief. It was a look of damnation. As if he’d just been condemned to live.

The world around them, as they knew it, went grey. The songs of birds became distant, meaningless noise. The very air lost its taste. He was a king holding the corpse of his universe.

The place where she died is forever changed. The leaves there are always the colour of autumn gold, and the air is permanently warm, a tiny island of lost summer in the heart of the cold wood. The golden light filtered through the leaves of their beloved Greenwood, now a place of hazy memories, echoes of their Queen forever gone.

It is the most beautiful and sorrowful place I know.

The man who walked out of that glade was not the same one who entered. The quiet warmth in him was extinguished. What remained was duty. Brittle and absolute. He became the mighty Elvenking, all fortress walls and impenetrable calm. From his throne, he rules flawlessly and protects us fiercely. But lives in a winter that only he can feel.

Not long after, when he was drowning himself in his cups of wine, he had asked me, in a voice so uncharacteristic of him, " Can an unborn child’s fëa… linger?" he asked. His voice was flat. "If the mother is strong? If she loved it enough?"

I told him no. It is a cruel truth, but a truth. The child’s spirit goes with the mother’s to the Halls of Mandos. They are not parted.

He just nodded and turned, and for a moment, the ever-present mask was gone. "She was so very warm," he said, his shoulders momentarily sagging as if the weight of the world pressed down upon him. I looked away. And in the span of a heartbeat, the king was back, his face once again frozen over in eternal serenity.

"Thank you, Galion. You may go.'"

Her son has her sunlight in his hair. But the King cannot speak her name. Her chambers are sealed. There is a portrait, they say, kept in a room no one enters. Once, the young prince found his way in and drew back the cloth. The King didn’t shout. He just went terribly still, like a statue. He placed a hand on his son’s shoulder, turned him gently, and led him out. A new lock appeared on the door before nightfall.

Sometimes, if you look close enough, the King's glacier-like eyes flicker when he looks at his son. His eyes wince where his face cannot. As if the boy’s happiness was a shattering noise against the perfect, fragile silence of his grief. He loves the prince; anyone can see that. But he loves him like a man loves the only tree left standing after a fire that consumed his entire forest. With a pride that is indistinguishable from pain.

The strangest thing, the detail that always catches in my throat, is the rings. In all the years after, the King began to wear them. Her rings. On the smallest finger of his right hand, a sleek band of silver set with a violet amethyst—the colour of her eyes. On his left pinkie, a clear quartz, like a captured tear. And on his thumb, a simple, heavy band of Elven-gold. It was her wedding ring, the one he placed upon her finger in the sunlit grove. He never speaks of them. But when the torchlight catches the stones, I see him sometimes turn his hand, just so, watching the fire dance in the quartz or the deep light of the amethyst. He does not wear them to remember her, I think. He wears them because a part of him is still missing, and their weight on his skin is the only thing that tells him where it went.

So that is the story, or as much as there is. We do not have a queen. We have the shape of where one was. The King builds taller walls, digs deeper halls, and the forest grows darker. And sometimes, on the coldest days, when we all find ourselves missing a warmth we can barely remember and bitter feelings spill from youthful mouths. We older folk have to hush them, knowing the truth of it.

The sun of his life set on a quiet afternoon in the woods.

Yet we all still wonder what this kingdom would have been if its light had never gone out.