Four days of recovery felt like imprisonment.
Legolas spent them in his chambers, eating food he barely tasted, attempting the exercises the healer prescribed, and trying very hard not to go mad with inactivity. His spiritual reserves were rebuilding—he could feel the warmth returning to his center, the light-echoes slowly refilling—but the process was agonizingly slow.
On the fourth evening, when the emptiness had receded enough that reaching for the Inheritance Space no longer felt dangerous, Legolas closed his eyes and sank into meditation.
The boundary between worlds dissolved faster this time. Perhaps practice was making the transition easier, or perhaps his soul was adapting to the mechanics of access. Either way, he found himself standing in the ruined library within minutes of beginning.
The space had changed.
Where collapsed passages had blocked his exploration before, doors now stood open. The destruction remained—shattered shelves, scattered debris, evidence of whatever catastrophe had damaged this archive—but paths had cleared through the wreckage. New chambers beckoned from beyond thresholds that had been sealed during his last visit.
Success unlocks access, Legolas thought. The pattern made a certain sense. He'd proven he could use what the Space offered; it was offering more.
He walked deeper into the ruins.
The first new chamber held nothing useful—empty pedestals where objects had once rested, walls covered in scripts so damaged they were illegible. The second contained fragments of what might have been a map, showing coastlines that no longer existed and kingdoms that had drowned millennia ago.
The third chamber made him stop breathing.
It was a training hall. The architecture shifted here, becoming more martial than scholarly—practice floors marked in complex patterns, weapon racks that stood empty but whose outlines suggested blades of impossible elegance. And in the center of the space, arranged in a loose circle, stood figures.
Elves, frozen in mid-motion like sculptures carved from light.
Legolas approached the nearest. The figure was tall—taller even than Thranduil—with golden hair that seemed to glow from within. His posture suggested a strike just begun, sword extended in a pattern Legolas's inherited memories recognized but couldn't name.
Glorfindel, the knowledge came from somewhere deep. Lord of the House of the Golden Flower. Balrog-slayer. Dead in the fall of Gondolin.
The figure's eyes were closed. Whatever animated these constructs, it was dormant now.
Legolas reached out.
The moment his fingertips touched the frozen light, the figure moved.
Not naturally—not like a living being awakening from sleep. The motion was stylized, deliberate, a demonstration rather than spontaneous action. Glorfindel's sword completed its arc, and his body flowed through a combat sequence that should have been too fast to follow.
Legolas watched, and as he watched, he understood.
The knowledge settled into his mind the way the light-weaving theory had—not as memorization but as integration. He suddenly knew why each position existed, how each movement connected to the next, what weaknesses each stance created and how to exploit them. Centuries of combat excellence compressed into moments of observation.
The construct completed its demonstration and froze again.
Legolas stepped back, reeling. The knowledge was there, crystal clear, more comprehensive than anything Legolas's original training had provided. First Age Elvish swordwork, developed by warriors who had fought Morgoth's armies and survived.
He knew it all.
And his body couldn't execute any of it.
That discovery came later, after he'd withdrawn from the Space and returned to his physical chambers. Legolas stood in the center of his room and reached for the forms Glorfindel's construct had demonstrated.
His arm extended. Wrong angle. He tried to correct, and his shoulder locked in a position that was neither the new pattern nor Legolas's original training. His feet stepped forward, and the weight distribution felt impossible—he knew where his center should be, but his muscles had spent three thousand years learning different habits.
The sword form collapsed into a graceless stumble.
Legolas laughed. The sound echoed in the empty chamber—half frustration, half genuine amusement at the absurdity of his situation. He'd just received combat training from a legendary hero of the First Age, and he couldn't walk through a basic strike without tripping over his own feet.
Knowledge isn't skill.
The gap between them had never been clearer. His mind held techniques that could match any warrior in Middle-earth. His body held muscle memory developed over millennia for completely different approaches. Bridging that gap would take months of physical practice—months of fighting his own instincts until the new patterns overwrote the old.
He tried again anyway.
The second attempt was marginally better. The fifth still terrible. By the twentieth, his arms ached and sweat beaded on his forehead—physical exertion that his Elvish body shouldn't require for simple movement drills.
But tiny improvements accumulated. A position that had felt impossible started to click. A transition that had been jarring smoothed by imperceptible degrees. The body was learning, slowly, to accept what the mind already knew.
Legolas collapsed into his chair as night deepened outside his window. His muscles screamed protests they had no right to feel. His breath came harder than any Elf should experience from basic training.
And he was smiling.
Worth it, he thought, echoing his conclusion after the first cleansing. Every cost is worth it.
Tomorrow, he had other work to do. Tauriel deserved her captaincy, and he was going to make sure she got it.
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