After a few hours, his skin starts to lose its bounce. The cold took him a while ago, and the muscle of his arms stops resisting Aar’tan’s fingers when he gingerly squeezes them. He’s spent from his grieving, eyes red and swollen, gazing hazily through Carwith. Hands tacky, clothes soaked through with his blood.
In the macabre verse adaption, I’ve elected to give up on being a coward and decided that Aarhir and Carwith were, from a young age, two small gays in love. That’s absolutely key to this entire situation (and practically was key in Tolkien’s verse as well). But it translates better in this verse as the climate for that romance would simply never allow for it.
Aarhir belongs to a family which, prior to the north’s colonialization of Thalassia, belonged to nobility. They fell out of favour, though, when Aarhir’s grandparent had a child (Uncle Akamu), out of wedlock, with a human. Their status was even more forgotten when new rulers were installed. Over time their wealth began to dwindle, to a point where Aarhir’s mother and father now make a humble living through a fishing and running a cafe by the seaside, though Aarhir has dreams of being a great adventurer (and in fact, so does Carwwith alongside him). They are fortunate to have more money than their neighbours, but in Carwith’s household, they’re considered “the common rabble”.
Carwith’s father, Cerwin, is considered a renowned war hero turned politician, hence being entrusted with governing Thalassia. Being from the eastern holds, Cerwin brought the tradition of arranged marriage with him to Aarhir’s part of the world, and he’s ruled for a few hundred years to make it stick.
So Aarhir and Carwith are born into a time where arranged marriage is common, and Carwith knows the day will come where he’ll be pitted off to a wife and expected to make children. Neither of them want this but they expect it. Worse yet, Cerwin hardly even approves of them being friends, let alone lovers; he doesn’t want his son associating with a “poor”, disgraced, fish-smelling family from town and has this preconceived notion Aarhir’s up to no good. Cerwin is also his only child, and wouldn’t you believe that I - little miss drama queen - add the complex of Carwith’s mother having died of complications after childbirth, making Cerwin his only real family anymore and even more cherished to him.
Eventually a wife is arranged to marry Carwith so of course Aarhir has this brilliant idea (hint it’s terrible) that they should up and run away together, pack their things and slip past the guards in the middle of the night so they can go north, become new people, and marry one another instead. Neither of them have any experience of the outside world. Lo and behold, they make it to the next, very small town over and last no more than a few nights before they’re being tailed by Gwynne, who in this verse is confirmed to be in people trafficking/slave trading and would have made an awful lot of money off Carwith. But things go south very quickly, they loop around trying to run and avoid them and pass back through a river. Carwith gets stuck with arrows. There, that elven strength kicks in and Aarhir drops all of their things to sling Carwith over his back and carry him all the way back to Thalassia for help pretty much non-stop, no sleep, no rest. But it’s still not fast enough. Carwith dies, of course, and the guards find them just a few miles away from town.
Aarhir is barred from the funeral, blamed for the death, accused of having killed Carwith himself, and a trial date is set. Though Cerwin is distressed and already decided he’s guilty, he does try to be a fair ruler to the town, and he sets him a trial date that he intends to reach a verdict on very quickly. Talia and Ar’tuel (Aarhir’s parents) scrape together enough for bail, and Talia - protective a mother as she is - sneaks her boy onto one of his father’s boats and sends him away, because she doesn’t want to see him hang for a crime she doesn’t believe he committed.
So begins probably hundreds of years of running from horrifically assassins and everyone sent after him by grief-stricken and particularly vengeful Cerwin, who becomes something of a recluse as time goes on to become utterly obsessed. In essence he won’t give up until he knows for sure that Aarhir is dead.
And i guess that completes that chapter? I’m just loving having all this freedom to play about with Aarhir and make his situation worse.
