Good King Thranduil Kicks Butt

By Katharine

Disclaimer: The Lord of the Rings and all related properties are copyrights of J.R.R. Tolkien, et al. This story is written for entertainment purposes only. No infringement is intended.

Warnings: Rated PG for a bit of violence and some nice death. Hee.

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"Father, please, listen to m—"

Glass shattered. The wall flowed with crimson, the stain of wine and hate and splintered hopes. The shards of the deep green bottle lay where they fell, the shards glinting in the lamplight.

"Nay!" The word resounded in the silence left in the wake of the bottle's violent demolition. The voice was slurred with too much drink—and the wrath consequently stirred to blazing life. "Speak to me not, child, so long as you look with favor on that…that half-human whore!"

Eva Starlily, the shining star of her home forest of Lothlórien, knelt in one corner of the room, her slender hands clutched in her lap. Her silver-green eyes glittered with tears of horror and fear as she gazed upon her love, her sweet golden prince, and the terrifying specter that was his royal father, the King of Mirkwood. She dared not interfere with the appalling scene playing out before her; she had no doubt that the King would kill her if she did so. Her dress had been whiter than winter's first snowfall, but the flowing hem had been torn, and only a miracle of anatomy kept the gown's top portion from slipping downward any further than it already had. The Flamejewel of Eärendil, a flowering white gem of untold worth to the Elves, rested against the pale skin just above her bosom, its faint light accentuating her fair features and delicately upswept ears. Thick, curling tresses the hue of the harvest moon spilled over her shoulders and down her back, framing a face bruised by multiple blows, a face once lit with joy, now crumpled with pain.

Legolas Greenleaf bravely stood between his irate father and his defenseless lady. "Strike her again, Father, and you are my father no longer!" he said, only the slightest quaver in his voice betraying his own fear.

The King's dark eyes narrowed in rage, and his hard features twisted. "You would abandon your own family for…a half-bred wench of Lothlórien?" he hissed. "Then I gladly say that you are no son of mine!"

"Then we shall leave together," Legolas answered, backing slowly toward Eva. "You need never see either of us again."

"Oh, no, boy," the King laughed drunkenly, "you will not get away that easily. You may leave, but no half-human whore is going to take you from me! She will die first, and mark me, if you hinder me, you will die directly after her!"

"Go, my love!" Eva sobbed, clinging to Legolas' tunic and shrinking away from the King's angry leer. "Go, save yourself!"

"I cannot, my love," the golden prince answered softly, and the deepest love shone in his summer-blue eyes. "For to do so would be to abandon my heart, and none that I know of can live without that vital core."

The King roared wordlessly at the selfless declaration from his son. His eyes wild with rage, he yanked his sword from its scabbard and plunged forward, intending to drive the blade deep into Eva; and then, with her blood yet fresh and warm upon it, he would pierce Legolas as well. Lothlórien's bright star and Mirkwood's golden sun clung to each other in fear, yet they were brave, for they would face their deaths together, enveloped in the love they shared—

"Enough!"

The command lanced through the turbulent air, delivered with more force than even the King had exuded at his most tyrannical moment. A deep, resonant thmmm sang out in the room, and of a sudden, the King staggered and collapsed to the floor at the lovers' feet. The terrible monarch of Mirkwood gagged on his final breaths, choking up blood, clutching with ring-encrusted hands the long arrow that pierced his throat. A final gout of crimson spilled from his nose, and he fell silent, the cruel eyes frozen open in shock.

A figure stepped out of the shadows at the far end of the room, shaking his head in utter disgust. Eva gasped against Legolas' chest. The newcomer was tall and imposing, robed in verdant green, with finely plaited locks as glossy and golden as her own prince's. Those flaxen tresses fell round a handsomely carven face, into which were set a pair of smoldering silveron eyes, eyes that flashed and radiated power so intensely that Eva could hardly meet his gaze. His ears were as upswept as her own, the noble arches clearly identifying him as an Elf. He held a longbow in one hand, and in the other, a second arrow waiting to be fitted to the string.

"Feh," he said disdainfully, scowling down at the dead King and arching one dark brow at the pool of sticky blood collecting round the corpse. "He does not even look like me." He flicked his gaze up to regard Legolas and Eva. "Ah, there you are. Might you be the overly pretty facsimile of my son I was warned of?"

Legolas' arms tightened around Eva's slender form, and he straightened up and met the newcomer's stare, his blue eyes sparkling with defiance. "I am Legolas Greenleaf, prince of Mirkwood and betrothed of this lady, Eva Starlily of Lothlórien."

The strange Elf grimaced. "Sweet Elbereth," he muttered, "'tis more of a curse than I had reckoned. His form is that of a warrior, but his face is like unto a maiden's."

Eva did not quite understand the stranger's speech, but she felt compelled to speak to him. Forsaking Legolas' warm embrace for the moment, she stepped forth, one hand serving to keep the top of her gown from falling, the other outstretched in the most graceful of appeasing gestures. "My lord," she said in her lilting, musical voice, "I must thank you for our lives. My love and I—"

She would never finish the sentence. Before her words were permitted to truly take shape on the air, the golden-haired Elf leveled a glare of such intensity upon Eva that her breath quite literally froze in her lungs. Something very dark and very dangerous speared outward from those luminous silver eyes, striking deeply into the half-Elven woman's soul, instantly splicing her very being into a thousand agonized fragments—

—and a shrill scream rent the air—

—and Eva Starlily exploded into a million bloody scraps, the incarnadine rain of her annihilation creating the most violent of murals upon the floor and walls and ceiling. The Flamejewel of Eärendil (whatever that was) fell with a muted, mournful clink to the floor, where it lay amid a tattered mass of red-soaked cloth and flesh. The walls again flowed with crimson, the stain of a rightful father's vengeance.

Silence reigned for several long, shocked moments. Legolas Greenleaf stared at the blood and bone and skin splattered on the floor, stared at the gore slapped against the walls, stared most especially at the deep crimson stains blossoming on his own clothing. Sparkling tears trickled down his rose-blushed cheeks as he beheld his lover's ghastly fate. And his incandescent blue eyes, those shimmering orbs of sapphire that had so captured Eva Starlily's heart, slowly bled away their innate radiance. The color fled his beautifully crafted features, and his immortal life fled the shell of his flesh so swiftly that his skin had taken on the grey hue of death before his body struck the ruby-bathed floor. His last word hung in the air, expelled in the last sigh of breath: "Eva…"

The stranger—one King Thranduil of Mirkwood, hale and whole, and blessedly genuine—alone stood, surveying the grisly tableau laid out before him. He absently fingered the arrow yet clutched in his right hand. "I see now why my Legolas so abhors these imitations of himself," he muttered. "Weak, pining, fawning deities, the lot of them." His silveron gaze fell upon the corpse lying nearest himself, the twisted form yet clutching the arrow that had pierced his throat and taken his wretched life. "Well," Thranduil sighed, "that was among the more satisfying things I've done recently." A growl reverberated low in his chest. "Where did such an abomination come from, I wonder…?"

There was no answer. The silence hung thick and heavy with the scent of death, of spent rage and shattered fantasy. Thranduil's lips twitched upward in a smile. "I suppose I ought to be getting back now," he said aloud, sniffing imperiously at the gore all about. "My son awaits me at the chess board."

With that, the true King of Mirkwood turned and faded back into the shadows from whence he had come. In his wake, he left the chill and unnatural hush of violence's abrupt cessation, a heavy fog to settle upon the two silent corpses and the rapidly cooling spatters of scarlet that had been Eva Starlily. The Flamejewel of Eärendil flickered once, flickered twice, and gave out at last, its brilliant light extinguished by the untimely death of one so sweet and so pure as its bearer. And the entirety of Middle-earth, with all its inhabitants both human and Elven, mourned her passing, and also the passing of the greatest love ever to—

—thmmm—

—gluck—

—ack—

—thd-thud—

—and Thranduil's grim chuckle sounded in the ensuing silence. "I do so hate those blasted narrators, as well."

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Notes:

Ah, Thranduil, my love! Thy patented Elvenking Glare of Death™ shall reign forever!

(thumbs nose at all Evil!Thranduil fics) Take that, un-canon wretches!