I’m thinking about Aerin in the winter.
The winter customs, including the Hadorian new year around the solstice all but end after the Nírnaeth. Their songs are forbidden. There are new songs, new traditions. Some they are forbidden to partake in, some they are required to.
Aerin watches people die each year; people who have known her since birth, who have taught her their people’s history, lore, songs, who taught her to ride, comforted her when she fell…
It is not just them who are lost, she knows. It is the rhymes and ghost stories and jokes. The skills and knowledge.
There are other changes too. Winters in Hithlum are cold. As long as Aerin can remember there have beenhundreds of tasks each autumn to preserve food, ensure hay for their horses and cattle, fortify structures and collect firewood…This does not stop but it changes.
As I’ve spoken about, one awful aspect of the occupation are the myriad ways that the agricultural customs and ways of interacting with the environment, are forbidden or suppressed. Many are lost.
We know from canon that Aerin is one of the few providing food and warmth to those who have been cast out, and that she likely suffers for it. She walks among the ill and injured, even when she is ill and injured herself, giving what she can in secret.
Sador speaks of this as her “keeping the old ways” of their people; it defiance both personal, she is defying Brodda and the position he has forced her into, and culturally; she is maintaining values that are vital to them amid oppression and brutality.
And of course Aerin’s courage and conviction doesn’t erase the horror of being put into this position, the sting and shame of rejection from those who have turned or been turned against her.
Brodda leaves for about a fortnight each winter and Aerin especially dreads the times she is forced to accompany him. It is in these days she feels the most a stranger; called a name that is not hers, frozen in a position she never wanted, in clothes she is forced to appear in.
She bites her tongue. She thinks of fire.
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