Goldberry

“She felt like she stood on ground that was crumbling away under her feet.

She didn't know what the right course of action was.

She didn't know which way to go.

So, in the end, she would do the one thing she did know.

The one thing she was good at.

She would stand her ground.

And she would fight until she found her way.

If she ever did.”
― ISeeFire, Of Dwobbits, Dragons and Dwarves

“I wonder for the first time, with a sharply caught breath, if I did love Peeta then. If the grief that poured out of me during his Games had been the outcry of a breaking heart, rendered powerless to prevent her beloved's pain. If I agreed to his bargain not simply to save my family but because my heart desperately wanted to live in the glow of his. If the kiss I clumsily pressed to his cheek after the Reaping – the kiss that sent me sprinting back to the woods to burrow among the roots of an old tree and cry myself sick – had nothing to do with debt or gratitude and everything to do with love and loss.

I wonder if I've loved him since that moment under the apple tree when a boy with a bruised cheek threw burnt bread and life to a dying girl. A girl who grew and thrived because of that boy and that bread, who wished for five years that she could have soothed his cruel bruise with a kiss.

Was that why I kissed him after the Reaping? Had I been carrying that clumsy kiss inside of me all that while? Had Peeta brought life to my heart as well as my body that hopeless day in the rain?

Have I ever not loved him?

I shake away these troubling thoughts with a shiver that reaches to my bones. My love for Peeta is fresh and fragile as a hatchling, I'm sure of it; kindled by his compassion and coaxed into its present brave blaze by the tenderness he shows me at every moment. It's foolish and futile to wonder whether I might have loved him before coming here, let alone when that love might first have flickered into existence. I am a wild creature, devoted to the boy who tamed me with warmth and food and gentle touches, and I accordingly express that love with woodland gifts.

Like a courting bird in an old tale, bringing her sweetheart all manner of odd little presents to feather his nest.”
― Mejhiren, When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun

“All she could see was that she'd already had her first failure.

A second chance, according to her aunt.

She was wrong.

There were no second chances, not for her. Not after the reason it had all gone wrong the first time was because of her. Because she was too much of a coward to act.

She was here because of the cursed ring. Her curse.

This was no second chance.

It was a punishment.”
― ISeeFire

“Their hopes, dreams and fears had been bound up in the figure of Thorin Oakenshield.

Bound with him, and died with him, and as Thorin had gone so had they all.

She rode now with a company of ghosts.

Fourteen souls had marched to Ravenhill, and eleven husks had left it.”
― ISeeFire