The council is too quiet.

Elves breathe like they’re worried the air might scold them for being loud. Fíli keeps bumping my shoulder, trying to drag my attention back to talk of rings and shadows, but my mind wanders the way it always does when things are solemn and important and far too still.

Then the light shifts.

A hush moves through the elves closest to the archway. Heads turn. The air… tightens. I follow their gaze—

—and my heart just stops.

Someone steps through the arch. Tall. Moon-pale. Hair like fresh-fallen snow, loose down her back. A circlet of living birch rests on her brow, pale leaves trembling as she walks. Her gown is silver and deep green, moving like water over stone, like the rivers she once told me stories about when we were both nobody in exile.

For a moment I can’t breathe.

It can’t be her. It has been twenty years. Twenty years since campfires and worn bedrolls and her laughing at my awful carving. Twenty years since I watched her walk away and told myself it was better this way.

She steps fully into the light, and my stomach drops.

“Fíli…” I whisper.

He glances at me. “What is it?”

I don’t answer. My fingers curl hard around the arm of my chair. I can’t look away.

I remember her in exile—barefoot in the dust, laughing at my terrible carvings, hair braided with river grass instead of crowns. She was wild then, bright, stubborn, slipping food to strangers even when we had none. No queen’s robes. No titles. Just her. And somehow… that was when she was most dangerous to my heart.

She carries herself different now. No longer a princess tucked in the corner of other people’s halls. She moves like she belongs here. Like every eye in this place has a right to look at her and still won’t see enough.

Someone speaks, clear and formal across the stones:

“High Queen Cynthia Singollo of the Teleri.”

The name hits like an arrow to the chest.

It is her.

My throat goes dry. “Fíli,” I breathe, “that’s her.”

I feel him go still beside me. “You’re certain?”

“As certain as I know my own hands,” I manage. “It’s her.”

Before he can say more, another shape slips into place at her side.

Galdor of the Havens.

Teleri grace, all long lines and soft-moving robes and that smooth, quiet way of existing that has always set my teeth on edge. I have never liked how easily some elves move through the world, untouched, as if nothing has ever dared bruise them.

I hate the way Galdor exists— that effortless fluidness, that sea-smooth grace— unless it’s her.

On her, that kind of grace makes sense. On her, it looks like it was forged there by river and moonlight both. On him, standing so close, it feels like an insult I don’t have words for.

He leans slightly toward her, saying something low. His sleeve brushes her arm.

Something fractures clean through me.

Fíli’s hand lands lightly on my forearm. “Kíli,” he murmurs, “breathe.”

“I can’t,” I whisper back. “I thought— I thought she’d be… gone. Happy. Somewhere else. Not here. Not like this. Not with him.”

It isn’t just pain. It’s twenty years of letters unsent, words unsaid, the shape of a life I almost had and then convinced myself to forget. Seeing her now, crowned and untouchable, standing beside another Teleri who looks at her like she is some distant star—

it feels like I am watching someone quietly steal a story that used to have my name in it.

“She can’t,” I breathe, barely sound at all. “She can’t be his. Fíli… I still—”

I shut my mouth before the word love falls out, but it hangs there anyway, heavy as a hammer.*

Only my brother hears me. Only he feels how badly my hands shake where they grip the chair. No one else notices the prince of Erebor sitting among them with his heart cracking wide open.

Because all I can see is her. My chest pulls toward her as if twenty years were nothing but a held breath.

Not the princess in exile. Not the girl in worn boots beside smoky fires.

The Queen.

And the truth that never died in me:

I never stopped loving her. I ache for her—quiet, sharp, the kind of longing that never learned how to die.