Her body throbbed with pain, her tired muscles screamed from exertion, but they were distant to the tear she felt in her chest, blown open and raw, somehow more physical than the crack running through her collarbone above it. She could feel it, and the bruises, and the other fissures and sprains and pulls that laced through her entire body that she had attained through her fight with Bolg. A fight she hadn't even been able to finish – though she'd tried to take him down the mountain with her, it just hadn't been enough. She had not been enough, and she had found neither death nor solace.

His voice was already in her head, saying words that had both frightened and thrilled her, so for a moment she did not truly hear. Feet in the grass, though, alerted her, and looking away from her contemplation of the stars, she saw him.

In a moment, she was up – far less gracefully than she ever had in her life, encumbered as she was by her wounds. “What is this?” she whispered. She wanted to collapse back onto the earth, and weep. Was this some spirit that had come to greet her? Death was so much more final for the Silvan elves, who had not contemplated the mysteries of the West, and she feared she had not been able to accept it as she ought to. There was nothing fell about him, never that, but a vision was still at risk of being a lie, and Tauriel could not bear to watch him fade away with the dawn. She had lost him once already, and even that she did not think she could truly bear.