Summary: His eyes were as hard as the bloodied edge of his blade. “You cannot look away from death, Irissë. It is a part of the hunt, a living beast that runs ever in its train. If you mean to hunt, you must know when to deal mercy, by your own hand, if your arrows do not.”
In which Aredhel learns and deals mercy, in all of its guises. Or, an examination of why Aredhel pleads for Eöl's life, written for @nolofinweanweek.
Aredhel slipped beneath the green-clad boughs of the wood, as fleet-footed as a maiden of Nessa greeting the spring upon the greenswards. In her hand she held the bow Fingon had made for her, small and curved and light, with silver scrollwork and runes of never-erring set into its slender limbs.
Fingon had at last said that she was ready to hunt, and she was too eager to wait for him to join her, as he had promised to.
Birdsong spilled from the branches as she passed beneath, ears pricked for the sound of stirrings in the undergrowth and hands ready upon her bow. She caught the patterings of squirrels clattering up bark-clad boles; the soft, slinking step of foxes hunting their own quarry, and the delvings and diggings of voles in the dirt. And then—the soft, cautious tread of a hare.
Long ears twitched among the feathered leaves of the bracken. A nose and trembling whiskers, sniffing. The gleam of a wide, amber eye struck by the light of Laurelin lancing through the canopy.
Silently, Aredhel knelt amongst the bracken. Arrow feathers brushed her jaw as she drew the bowstring taught.
The hare rose up, sniffing, and bared the pale fur of its stomach for only a moment, but that was all that Aredhel needed.
The limbs of her bow trembled, and the bowstring sang out. The hare's ears swiveled, and its whiskers twitched, sensing the danger too late. The arrow flew true, and the hare fell like a stone, thumping softly upon a bed of bracken.