The cloaked figure that had stood unnoticed by the window slipped to the corner of the house, from where he could watch unseen as the couple danced on the beach to the endless music of the waves, the gold of his hair shining in the moonlight as it blew and mingled with the shadow of hers. He smiled faintly, thinking of the tale the young man had told.
Over the millennia, even when the Elven realms had been sustained and his people yet walked at times among Men, he had heard many legends and corrupted tales created around the lives of his friends and kin—and, indeed, his own. Lothlórien had become the golden wood of a sorceress, while Lúthien and Beren were nothing more than the chief characters in a tragic tale of love.
But this—somehow this was different. Warped almost beyond recognition though the story was, to one who had watched the hero, his father and grandfather all grow from infancy to strong, beautiful maturity the central figures were easily identified. On one hand it seemed unbelievable that history—particularly the events leading to the War of the Ring—could have been so forgotten, so twisted by the time that did not touch his memory. On the other it was extraordinary that young Thranduilion, golden and laughing, vibrantly alive and present should be recalled as a vague, nameless incarnation of the hero of a thousand tales, somehow changed from a living being to an unreal myth, a prince of long ago and far away, who left the earth long before memory began, his birth remembered but the truth of his life all but forgotten. How strange that Legolas could be at once a hollow form filled with the accumulated heroism of centuries and, somewhere, the same living, laughing Elf he had known.
He found himself wondering suddenly whether Legolas had known, whether any such tales had grown up about him to create of him a living legend during the years he spent in Gondor. That thought, however, was dismissed: Elessar had ensured that the truth of the War was remembered, at least for his lifetime; while Legolas, half amused, half horrified, would have shattered such romantic illusions with one colloquial Westron retort.
Perhaps now, after all the intervening years, the humour would exceed the horror, were he to learn that his life had become the subject of a fireside tale for the children of Gondor.
Perhaps someone should find and tell him.
Perhaps that someone should be me.
Perhaps the time has come.