The forest hums before we even see her. Not in sound, but in that stillness that feels alive—like the air itself holds its breath waiting to remember a name it once knew. Mist curls low through the birch trunks, silvered and shifting. The smell of moss and clean water lingers sharp as cold metal in my lungs.

Gandalf walks ahead, staff striking rhythm against root and stone, but his steps slow as the path widens. Even Thorin’s boots, which never seem to hesitate, falter. Kíli leans close and whispers something about ghosts, and for once I can’t tell if he’s wrong. “Mind yourselves now,” he says without turning. “The Queen of Taur Im Duinath does not take kindly to arrogance. Speak only when you’re spoken to—and for Mahal’s sake, Thorin, keep your pride bridled.”

Thorin snorts behind him, a sound halfway between offense and dismissal. “I know how to hold my tongue.”

Gandalf’s reply comes quiet as thunderclouds gathering. “You never did with her. Which is why you’ve not spoken to her in twenty years.”

That stops him cold.

Even I glance back, half-expecting a retort, but my uncle says nothing. His hand tightens on the pommel of Orcrist instead, knuckles pale beneath the leather. Kíli catches my eye, and the unspoken thought passes between us—whatever waits ahead, it isn’t going to be just diplomacy.

Then she appears.

Between two white birches, their trunks bending inward like sentinels, she stands—motionless, taller than any immortal has a right to be, radiant in the half-light. Her hair catches the fog as if it’s drawn to her, a spill of silver that turns the air to light. The crown upon her head breathes with the wind itself, woven of birch and leaf, alive. Her armor gleams the way moonlight would if it could bleed into green. Even the river below the ridge seems to quiet, waiting.

I do not breathe. None of us do.

And then Thorin breaks the silence. “By Mahal’s beard…” he murmurs under his breath, voice cracked and reverent all at once. “She hasn’t changed a day.”

The way he says it hits like a hammer to the chest. I glance toward him, expecting anger or mockery in his face, but all I see is loss—raw and unguarded, the kind a man carries long after he swears he buried it.

It’s strange, seeing my uncle that way. Stranger still to feel my stomach twist with something dangerously close to envy. Because she turns her gaze upon us then—upon him—and I understand what he once had, what he threw away.

Her eyes are silver-green, calm and unreadable, but the power in them is enough to bend the air. There’s no anger there in them. No warmth, either. Just stillness so deep it feels like judgment. She does not speak. She doesn’t need to. Every tree, every breath of wind, every drop of mist seems to speak for her.

I hold my tongue. Thorin, miraculously, does too.

Yet I can feel it—the way he still looks at her, as if he’s standing before some old altar that won’t forgive him. I want to look away, but I can’t. I can’t, because I know that if I ever looked at someone like that, it would break me too.

And so I make myself a silent promise in that fog-bound clearing: I will not condemn myself to that kind of devotion.

But as her gaze sweeps across me, steady and unflinching, I realize I’ve already failed.