@SHIELDARM

ALL THINGS HAVE SONGS, NOT ALL SONGS ARE JOYFUL.

[shieldarm-a]

ÉOWYN UNDER-KING.    primarily and almost exclusively headcanon based. heavily canon divergent. low activity and mutuals only. minimal formatting and iconless. written by charlie (she/they, 25+, southern us). muse info and rules brief below the cut. please read them. sideblog @under-king.

RULES BRIEF.    please do not use heavy additional spacing between words / characters or gradient-coloured text when writing with me. in general, heavy formatting is hard for me to read. blog is nsfw heavy and therefor exclusively 21+. minors will be blocked. all triggers are tagged with #trigger tw. mutuals only, all mutuals are welcome / invited to im me or ask for discord. if i don’t like you / the things you post, i will soft/hard block as i see fit.

warning that this blog will feature mentions of stalking, harassment, and attempted grooming in reference to gríma’s treatment of éowyn in her teenage years, i will never write or dramatize these situations but i will sometimes discuss the impact / influence of this trauma on éowyn’s mental health and her character as a whole, triggers will always be tagged but please follow with care

BIO BRIEF.    éowyn shield-arm, she/they/he, butch lesbian. fc kelly mccormack. main verse is set in a post-canon au in which éowyn does not marry but returns to rohan to serve as under-king and first marshal to her brother, the king of rohan. comfortable w/ feminine or neutral pronouns but masculine titles / formal modes of recorded address (lord, prince, etc). called shield-arm, lord of the shield-arm, éowyn under-king. slayer of the witch-king of angmar. lord of the eastfolde and prince of the house of eorl.

character insp sideblog @under-king

PHYSICAL.    towers at 6′4, lean / wiry build with noticeable musculature and obvious athleticism, straight, hard, and slightly thicker through her torso / trunk from years of riding. broad shouldered, narrow hipped, long legged. a long, pale face with strong chin, wide wind-chapped mouth, and angular jaw. ruddy in complexion, tanned from the sun, wind-chafed and freckled. has something in common with the horses she’s spent her life aback. coltish and stoic. strikingly sharp silver-grey eyes, golden hair worn at her shoulders and typically pulled back or tightly braided in the manner typical of men and warriors in her country. after the war, dresses in practical masculine style which still displays the wealth of her house and pride in her earned rank.

NOTABLE FEATURES.    the steely bearing of a warrior, smells of wind and horse and dried grass, a scar across the bridge of her nose and one at the cleft of her chin, numerous scars over her body concealed beneath her clothing, cutting eyes full of fire and an intimidating presence, stoic at first glance but impossible to ignore, a palpable intensity particularly in her focus and stare, left arm is webbed in black to purple veins from her the back of her hand to above her elbow, suffers chronic pain in this arm from a badly healed break when the mace of the witch-king shattered her ulna / radius / and wrist, carries the mark of the touch of the nazgûl that will never fully leave her, plagued all her life by dreams of the one she slew.

TAGS & NAVIGATION.    

#IC.  (all ic writing & content) #FC.  (faceclaim and physical insp) #ABOUT.  (all hcs + meta, related quotes/aes) #STORYBOARD.  (general themes + aes) #RE:ÉOMER.  (relationship tag, brother) #RE:THÉODRED.  (relationship tag, @eohere) #RE:THÉODWYN.  (relationship tag, mother) #RE:LOTHÍRIEL.  (relationship tag, sister-in-law) #RE:EIVOR.  (relationship tag, @notodin) #MEMES.  (memes & prompts, feel free to send)

MAINS & EXCLUSIVES.    tba.

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“I thought to speak was to ask for a muzzle. I thought to feel or to show you feel was to ask a sadist to make you flail. I thought to have a name was to have oneself abstracted and abstracted again into many bodies, some actual and corporeal or some ghostly or whiffs or some so strange, so far from you, they might as well be astral.”

— Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

[mynqzo]

feeding you all my buff lesbian musketeer barbie agenda

[heroineimages]

I'm into it.

[shieldarm-a]

éowyn doesn't often talk of or describe her life during the war (before her defeat of the witch-king)—it's humiliating for her, degrading, and it was difficult enough to endure it when she was living it, the absolute last thing she wants is to describe it in any detail to people who have met her once she is older and happy, when she is unabashedly herself and refuses to compromise that, because she just doesn't want them to 'see' her like that, to define her in that way, to somehow seize on that role she was playing as being a 'truer' version of who she is as society would very much like to do—not because she looks down on femininity but because the performance of femininity was so deeply inauthentic to her that she views it as a state of cowardice, failure, subjugation

and there is a significant part of her that will always feel that if she'd had the courage to defy her cousin and defy her uncle and directly challenge them despite their need to present a united front, if she had refused them and taken the role she knew to be right for her by force, if she had seized those loyal to her (we know there are a lot, it's featured in canon) and inserted herself as a warrior and military leader, then she could have saved the people that she loved, the very loved ones that she was willing to sacrifice her sense of self for, her uncle and cousin who died despite those years of humiliation that she endured in the name of trying to protect them

[shieldarm-a]

more éowyn content

[youmearepeaches]

Kelly McCormack by Molly Cranna for Archive Vintage

[weltenwellen]

Rita Dove, from "Voiceover"

[shieldarm-a]

éowyn's kind of insufferable, hope we all know that

[shieldarm-a]

“one kiss, and you will know all i have not said.” / HhmMMMm

       éowyn chuckles in response—a slow answer, and one she sees make a storm on eivor's face. the vikingr is a stubborn creature. stubborn, almost bashful at times, but often impatient, too. in the sooty light of their fire, éowyn can sense the thinness of the moment. does eivor expect to be refused? certainly not—but perhaps there is a part in her, the same as there is in éowyn, that goes mean at the first faint sign of hesitation in a tender situation such as this. éowyn understands that impulse. like as she is now to sway them only with a glance, women have laughed at her before. when she was young and unsure. when she lived someone else's lie. the ghost of that unsure person rises sometimes like a spectre, or like a snake with venom—all too ready to take revenge. so as not to be misunderstood, éowyn takes eivor's wrist in her hand to keep her from turning away.

       "you are a rare person, eivor—but you are not so much a mystery to me that i cannot see when you wish to be kissed." the curl of laughter in her voice is a tease, cruel but not wholly. as ever she does, éowyn toes the line between commanding and callous. that is her way. but even if her voice is cool, still the corners of her eyes are creased with the warmth of her affection.

       "you wear the truth of what you want from me in your expression. you have always done so—since the first you set your eyes on my unarmoured face."

       it is not only arrogance but also apparent truth. éowyn is arrogant, but she is also aware of herself, aware of herself in the eyes of others, and she does not lie. not to herself and not to others. this has always been one of her greatest strengths. in the fire-blue brightness of eivor's eyes, she can see her own reflection turned back as eivor sees it. pride, desire, respect. éowyn reaches for eivor's face, takes it in her hands, crowding her in with her limbs. beneath the white linen sleeves of her tunic that fall back when she lifts her arms, éowyn's forearms are strong and freckled, tanned from the sun, textured with fine golden hair, and smattered with silver scars, some faint and some still pinkened fresh. eivor's face is much the same. they are a compelling pair. different and similar. darkly the same. éowyn is prideful—but she feels pride, too, when she looks at eivor. not pride over the other warrior but in her. it's a rare and telling feeling. slowly, éowyn presses the pad of her thumb into the soft divot at the corner of eivor's barely-open mouth. a gentle, leading pressure.

       "perhaps it was a few moments after, when first you heard me speak."

       she is teasing still and, as she had anticipated, eivor reacts when éowyn pitches her voice down to her—just as she had reacted that night after they met in battle. the barest dilation of her eyes made brilliantly visible due to their own vicious brightness. éowyn smiles—but the expression is also still a smirk. she traces the lower line of eivor's mouth. éowyn can goad all she wishes but her own longing is obvious. she has done nothing to conceal it just as she has also done nothing to act upon it. it would not have been right to do so, to be the one to impress that desire upon them both, when eivor was indebted to her and the balance of their positions so skewed. they should be equals or else nothing.

       instead, she has waited weeks for eivor to come to her. she should feel triumph, and there is that—but more than that is a kind of reverence. like a penitent used to roadside shrines who has come at last to a true temple, a place where gods are properly worshipped. éowyn cares very little about the gods. eivor's demand is something else. éowyn wants to satisfy it fully—but she wants also to savour the offer.

       "you want to be kissed, and you say that if i kiss you, your unsaid desire will be plain—" as éowyn speals, eivor's brow furrows, perhaps growing impatient, and éowyn cannot resist the temptation to plant a thumb at that spot between her eyebrows, smoothing the crease between her almost colorouless eyes. eivor's face is flush, her breath fast. it is a silly gesture—when what is between her hands could kill her. éowyn bends the scant few inches down to eivor's mouth and murmurs, "and if i want to hear you say it? you will have had your orders met, but how then will i get what i am owed?"

quotes to a lover.

[shieldarm-a]

be on in a few hours to do drafts (i have one lol) and then i’d be interested in plotting for more threads, any mutuals in to that hmu

[shieldarm-a]

all of éowyn's tattoos are horse tattoos lmao

[shieldarm-a]

ÉOWYN UNDER-KING

[geryone]

I Will Tell this Story to the Sun Until You Remember that You are the Sun, Erin Slaughter

[shieldarm-a]

the éowyn inherent in this image

[rosources]

—         ask meme      :      THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR,   MAX GLADSTONE & AMAL EL-MOHTAR.pronouns / tenses changed in some places.

twice is coincidence. three times is enemy action.

killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. having killed never does.

you know — just as i’ve known, since our eyes met — that we have unfinished business.

it’s been so long since i last started a new conversation.

we knew one another as one knows a childhood dream.

our glorious crystal future shines so bright i gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

i’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light i tried to step.

it grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player. but then i imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: you could have killed me, but didn’t.

tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

there’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?

do i have you still? do i address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass?

if we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain each other.

that’s what we treasure. that’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.

hunger, ___ — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know?

have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? sometimes i think that’s what i have instead of friends.

this is a place i love, and hate myself for loving.

i was the only person on that tiny rock, and i made the world go dark.

i wanted to be seen. that need dug into the heart of me.

i was light, hollowed, hungry.

have you been lonely?

you place each stone expecting it may do many things. a confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.

i have observed friendship as one observes high holy days.

harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

what i return to, the me-ness that i know as pure, inescapable self… is hunger.

i love cities. to be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what i see and what i am.

shit. i’m sorry. i can’t keep up the joke. and it’s wrong to call you enemy.

i am more sensitive to your footsteps, i think, than anyone alive.

this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

i see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. i try not to think of you the same way twice.

i have built a you within me, or you have. i wonder what of me there is in you.

you’ve whetted me like a stone.

i remember bright light, and then — hunger. hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing.

i was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream.

this feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me. but i trust you.

there was, i am sure, a time i did not know you. or did i dream that me, as i’ve so often dreamed of you?

i want to be a body for you.

i sought loneliness when i was young. but when i think of you, i want to be alone together.

i want to be a context for you, and you for me.

i love you, and i love you, and i want to find out what that means together.

this is me, the truth of me: broken open, in the palm of your hand, dying.

you must feel it — the difference? we’re on the brink of something.

i would rather break the world than lose you.

i’ll be all the poets. i’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written it will be to you.

how could you die like this? how could you die at all?

sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.

[shieldarm-a]

small minded was me thinking éowyn would have a problem with poisoners / assassins / thieves and couldn't date one, growth is me acknowledging that éowyn is inherently drawn to any woman who can communicate in the language of violence / ruthlessness or at least comprehend that language that is so inherent and natural to her own worldview and sense of self

[shieldarm-a]

éowyn's mother théodwyn was princess of rohan, second in line after her brother théoden, while éowyn's father was éomund, who inherited the lordship of aldburg and the eastfolde from his own father of which he was the only surviving son. éowyn herself was born third in line for the crown after her brother and cousin, being as théoden had only one surviving child. after théoden's death she is second in line, first in line once her brother is crowned and before his son is born and able to ride and rope his own horse, roughly around twelve or thirteen—which is when he is considered 'of age' to rule. her brother is first in line for the lordship of aldburg until he accepts the crown, at which point lordship of aldburg (the largest city in rohan) and the wider folde passes to éowyn, since, in rohan, the king cannot hold primary lordship of any region other than the capital.