The first time the Princess Irisse had crossed the sea- well, she hadn't. Her Uncle had betrayed them and instead she faced the long walk across the Helcaraxe, the grinding ice.
Before that, however, she had packed as a young woman, loyal and eager and frightened, for an adventure.
There had been adventure across the sea, yes. There had also been tragedy and anger and loss and joy and love and betrayal and hope and sorrow.
Irisse had been a girl in mind if not in body when she followed her father to Arda.
Aredhel is a woman now and packs far more sensibly, as though she most have all she will need at every second carried on her person. It's a reasonable assumption, considering the lodgings she looks forward to for this journey. At the very worst she is discovered and the ship turns back.
(No. At the very worst she is thrown overboard, but Aredhel likes to think the sailors will not be so unreasonable; they have long had their fill of death.)
She will have to hide for most of the voyage and that limits her space but she knows now what is useful and what is not. She packs the good embroidery needles but brings no thread save what is in her healing kit. She has a striker box that is well waterproofed. A few changes of sensible clothes, some fine jewelry that can be melted down and its gems sold. Rope, always. A warm cloak and good socks.
There are other bits and pieces, tucked into the ship's belly as she sits in port. Queen Anaire's small army of little urchins are everywhere and Aredhel tips as many as she can for their help in gathering gossip, in laying rumor and bringing necessities to the ship, for what use are her fine things where she is going?
Her mother had said to her once that she would understand the need for their service and loyalty someday. That day has come at last. Without the little unwashed elflings she would not have had all the knowledge she did, or the excuses or time.
She does, though. It makes all the difference.
The night before the ship is to leave mother and daughter go down to the sand together in the dark, silent as snowfall.
Anaire looks at her child, but says nothing. They have argued for years, and if this counts as a second Doom, then the Pauper Queen will not see her only daughter again before the unmaking of the world.
Aredhel embraces her tightly.
"Look after him?" She whispers.
Her mother nods, then looks up. From the darkness steps a tall, pale elf with black hair and eyes just a bit too wide, set almost like an owl. There is no white in their sclera, the blue irises like lilies on a dark pond.
"One last time," he pleas. "Stay with me."
She steps up to him, cups his face in her hands. "You are not alone," she says, smiling through the inevitable tears. "And all the happiness you could not touch waits for you now. But I am not happy, Lomion, and to be so I must go."
"But if he denies you-"
"And perhaps he will and this is a fool's errand but I must try, my son. Unless you wish to set me in bonds to keep me here?"
His mouth snaps shut. She smiles sadly. "I would give him your regard," she says quietly, "and tell him I left you a whole and good man untouched by shadow, healed and healing. May I do this?"
He looks down for a moment and then back up. "I still need you," he says.
"So does he," Aredhel says. "Lomion. My Maeglin. May I?"
Her son inhales slowly and then says, "Our standard is folded in the bow. I asked one of the young ones to hide it today. Tell him what you wish."
It is all she will get from him, she knows; that he came at all when so many eyes linger on him is a sign of better things.
She hugs her son a final time and he muffles a sob in her shoulder. Anaire comes and takes her grandson's hand before looking at her daughter.
"This is foolish," she says, "but as I cannot stop you, as I could not before, I wish you calm seas and luck. You will need it."
Queen Mother and son grown walk back up the beach in the same silent darkness. Aredhel watches them go, and then turns to the long dock. There are some nervous minutes as she moves down the planks, climbing aboard her chosen vessel after checking its name thrice.
The Windwalker. Eol will like that. He always did have a love of fanciful tales. 'This is the story of the good ship Windwalker, and how it returned me to you.'
Aredhel stands on the deck in the perfect darkness and for a long moment wonders if she is making the right choice. She knows where her lost husband is, in a roundabout way; has some idea of the length of the journey. Across the sea it is just turning to spring. By midwinter she should be in the realm of the holly trees.
If he turns me away I return to the seashore and learn how to dive for pearls, she reminds herself.
(He will not turn her away. She is as certain of this as she is of her own name, of the whisper of an arrow that leaves her bowstring, of the inevitability of winter and the rebirth of spring, but it always pays to have a backup plan.)
The sun will start to draw the night in and paint the sky gray soon. Aredhel makes sure her final bribe is in place in the appointed barrel and opens the hold, slipping down the stairs and closing out the night behind her.
The little avari looks up from where he had been gazing out across the camp. "you're far from your minders, your majesty," he says, but Fingon is growing used to his casual rudeness and replies, "I can slip them when I wish. Will you answer my question?"
"It's the wrong question," he says. "You say 'did', as though I ever stopped."
"Do you love her, then?" Fingon asks, coming up beside Eol. It's a clear night, a good omen. The stars are winking brightly.
"I do," Eol says. "for all that may be worth to great folk like you."
Fingon's brow furrows. "A curious way to put it."
Eol shrugs. "You will note I am wifeless. And sonless, as it happens."
Fingon's eyes go wide. "You had- have- a son?!"
"I do. We did. Only recently passed his majority. He went with his mother to Gondolin."
"And you did not go with them."
"I was not invited. They laid the plans in secret, or so they thought." Eol snorts. "My realm may be half-sentient and all attitude, but she likes me better than most. I knew before they'd even begun the planning."
"Yet you did not stop them." Fingon says. "Curufin.."
"Has said some things, I'm sure," Eol says. "and perhaps there is a kernel of truth in them. If he tells you I denied her the right to see them, I did."
"May I ask why?" Fingon says coolly.
"You're not asking, you're ordering," Eol says, "which is why you folk have so much trouble communicating with anyone who didn't come with you on a boat or an ice float. Still." He sighs. "Upon a map Nan Elmoth does not seem like much. A smudge of darkness some three day ride from the Girdle of Melian and the border of Doriath. Yet she is bracketed on either side by Feanorians and has the most direct road in and out of the realm."
"..you feared Curufin would attempt to overthrow you," Fingon says.
"I see you're one of the smart ones," Eol says. "He would not have attempted, he'd have managed it. As temperamental and magical as Nan Elmoth is, I cannot be everywhere at once and maintain only one hall, with no more than thirty wardens at any time and any visitor who can hold a weapon. Numbers would overcome enchantment eventually. It would go far quicker if he were to ransom my Lady and my child."
"He wouldn-" Fingon starts, then he stops.
"Definitely one of the smart ones," Eol says with an approving nod. "I knew Indis' craftiness hadn't died off entirely."
"Yet that denial alone would not have swayed her," Fingon argues. "My sister has a spine of iron."
"She does," Eol says with a small smile. "No. We had begun to argue over it, and over her wish to return to Gondolin and present Ma-" he stops. "...present Lomion to the court."
Eol looks up at Fingon. "I am no courtier. I make a poor one in Doriath and I'd make an even poorer one in Gondolin. Then there is the small matter of the burning."
"Yes, Maitimo mentioned. The light..?"
"Yes, and the sun and moon. It's in all your eyes, you know," Eol says frankly. "It shines there, and when you look directly at me I can feel it pricking like needles in every inch of skin exposed. I've been spared here by virtue of armor and being so short amongst all you lofty Lords."
"So me looking at you right now-?" Fingon lifts his eyes and Eol's chuckle this time is grim. "I could almost be getting used to it," he says. "It was how I knew your sister had arrived- I could feel her looking at me."
He removes a pipe from inside his jerkin and begins to stuff it. "So imagine, if you will, your tall and beautiful sister, arrayed all in white. Followed by her equally tall and noble son. Then along comes this."
He gestures at himself.
"If I wasn't laughed out of Gondolin she'd surely have been shamed, since our marriage vows weren't consecrated by your people anyway."
"Personal humiliation is a poor reason to deny a loved one their home," Fingon says.
"A home she could not leave?" Eol says. "By your other brother's rule none in Gondolin may pass beyond it, and only her argument allowed her departure the last time. A new relation, a potential heir and the return of the sister he may well think lost? She will not be allowed to leave a second time."
He sighs.
"And before you say the words, I know them. 'Aye, but did you not do the same? Keep her when she wanted to roam?' I did. Which is why I did not stop their plan, or allow my servants to stop it."
He lights the pipe, drags in an admirable lungful of sweet smelling smoke, and breathes it out his nose like a dragon with not a sign of the coughing or sputtering that Fingon has seen accompany such actions amongst the Men.
"I left things in places. Left certain cupboards unlocked, made sure there were overages in food. Made certain to pack her good embroidery needles, the ones she'd kept tucked in her hair wrap. I didn't want her to forget them."
"Then you do not believe she will return to you?"
Eol laughs and the laugh is wretched and touched with sorrow. "No, your Majesty, I do not. What does dark Nan Elmoth with her one dim hall have to give that the White City could not? I've no towers or noble houses, no sprawling fields of golden wheat or fountains that shine with crystal water. What wealth I have is in the things I make, the deals I strike. There is no bounty rich enough in my starlit woods to slake your sister's need for adventure, nor my son's need for recognition and power."
Fingon is quiet. He thinks of Irisse- brilliant, eager Irisse, always ready for the next hunt, the next ride, the next run to the horizon.
"I do not know if it works the same for avari as it does for us," he says hesitantly, "but. If she had dissolved your vows, would you..not..?"
Eol snorts. "Some of us are made of sterner stuff. Aye, I could lay down and give up my rhaw, fade away to starlight to seek the road beyond to wherever it may take me. Where does that leave Nan Elmoth? Where does that leave my idiot halfbrother, my poor niece and her mortal husband? No." He shakes his head. "No, it cannot be allowed. I have troubled the living world this long, I will keep doing it."
Another pull and exhale. "I suppose you will naysay then that I love her."
Fingon thinks carefully before he says, "No. Once I might have argued, but there are many different kinds of elves and lives and loves. I cannot know them all. Perhaps none can."
"Then you are wiser than your cousin," Eol says tightly.
"What is your son's name?" Fingon asks in a desperate bid to be free of this line of conversation.
"She named him Lomion." Eol says. "I understand it means 'Child of Twilight' in your tongue."
"Did you give him a name as well?" Fingon asks.
Eol is quiet for a long time. Fingon almost wonders if he needs to repeat himself before the little avari says, "It took me twelve years to decide."
"Twelve years?!" Fingon sputters.
"Aye. Twelve years. He was simply 'Eolion' to me for that time, or owlet, or little one. It drove your poor sister mad, but I wouldn't be budged. I had to be sure."
"Sure of what? Making the right choice?"
"Sure that it was time to give it away."
Eol looks up at Fingon. "Eol is not my name, your Majesty. It is an epesse, given in sorrow and ill feeling in a time long forgotten, that came to fit in a way I couldn't escape. I never made use of the name my mother gave me. So I thought it was time it pass to someone who might bear it well."
Another pull at the pipe, the embers lighting up the backs of Eol's eyes and making them shine that unnatural aqua. "So on his twelfth name day, I told him I had a name for him. That it was old but barely used, and would be made stronger with his growing."
He blows the smoke in a perfect stream to curl away and rise above the camp. "I named my son Maeglin, your majesty, as my mother whispered it to me in her more lucid moments. Sharp Glance, is the closest I might come to a translation. He sees as far as I do. He sees farther."
Eol taps out the pipe.
"....yet even that he left behind, wanting no shackles from a stunted little dark elf to hold him from the light of his mother's kingdom in the mountains."
Fingon barely breathes as Eol cleans the pipe out and continues, "So I am bereft of wife and son and name, bereft of holding once my brother ascertains where the Silmaril he demanded as bride price has gone, and if your cousins have their way once this battle is done I will be bereft of my head."
"They wouldn't!" Fingon protests. "You returned the Silmaril with no demands or pretense! For that alone Tyelkormo and Curufin must stay their hands."
"Perhaps," Eol says, "but I don't believe that and neither do you. Still. I've chosen where to plant my little flag and I've planted it. Your beloved's half mad but I've followed worse."
The dark elf nods. "Good evening, your majesty."
He walks away into the dark, leaving a confused and morose Fingon to watch as the campfires start to burn out.
-stares with head in hands- I cannot believe that I am such a simp for height difference that in order to write an Eol and Aredhel who were in genuine love I had to make one a goddamn foot shorter than the other this post brought to you by that picture of Taika Waititi and whoever the green lady is from Thor and realizing that that’s what Thiccsmith Eol and Aredhel look like to casual onlookers.
They have been settled into their tent in what most elves have taken to calling Imladris but Eol refers to as 'The Miserable Mud Pit' for coming on half a year when Aredhel runs her fingers through the hair on the sides of Eol's head and murmurs, "it's getting long."
"Its not a problem," he says, distracted by lists. The desk they had carted off from the supply wagon when no one was looking (or when Eol made sure they couldn't look) was covered in lists written on stolen paper. So much to do. So many nails and tacks and codder pins to forge, so many axes and saws to sharpen.
"You're going to start to pull on it soon," she says gently. "Tomorrow afternoon. Take your shaving blade to the forge, get it sharp. I will do it for you."
He looks up at her, eyes unsure. She kisses him softly on the forehead and when he melts against her she holds him until the last of his reservations leave and he sags into her arms. They fit better on the cot that way, she's told him, and better sleep is good for busy craftselves.
-
Aredhel is not idle while Eol forges nails. She has set herself with the other fiber workers, weavers and embroiderers. They work the cloth of this new home, sewing tents and stockings and simple shifts for those who cannot clothe themselves, mending blankets and cutting rags for cleaning. Thread is wound, wool is carded, and gossip is thick.
To the others she is a noldo, probably from Sirion, who crossed the mountains before the great destruction and came to live in Eregion with her odd little avari husband. It is close enough to the truth and no one asks any questions. Aredhel sews and cuts and measures, helps another woman and a slight young man make a marriage quilt.
"It seems silly," the woman apologizes, "but they lost everything after that orc raid and I wanted them to have at least one nice thing. Aredhel, could you help me with the ivy on the hem?"
"Of course," she says, and embroiders ivy for the rest of the day, learning the new weaving songs and (when she thinks it won't give her away) teaching new ones to her compatriots.
She finds Eol as she always does at the end of the workday, finishing up and helping the young ones along. There are four or five of them- elves who barely passed their apprenticeships, whom the glorious jeweled smiths had no interest in.
"Bah," Eol had muttered viciously when they arrived seeking work. "just as much a fool as his father. You can't eat with a fork made of diamonds and you can't kill an orc with a sword forged from silver."
Aredhel had only laughed and made sure to learn the young smiths' names. They are growing in skill every day. She can see- in the way the women of the line of Finwe sometimes can- that her husband will make Imladris' smithies a hidden treasure that will be the envy of the elven kingdoms.
Not yet, she knows. But soon.
He has done as she asked and his shaving blade is sharp. They take their meal from the communal mess and eat quietly in their tent before she says, "Come. The river should be quiet and the sun has sunk low enough."
Eol hesitates. "Aredhel, you need not do this for me."
She holds out her hand. He looks at it and then at her. Slowly, he lifts his own. She can see how red it is- the color deeply tattooed into his palms and fingers.
She had watched the work done from afar, at the time a bodiless fae in the Halls of Waiting. In dreamlike whisps she had seen her husband offer his hands to the oldest of his mother's people, seen him twitch and shake as the thorn-tipped tool was dipped and tapped again and again and again.
She had watched him left alone to heal, given food he could take through straws or bowls held with his wrists or knuckles, for his fingers and palms were of no use.
Sometime soon he will have to travel to the caverns of Tata and Tatie, in the mountains of the Greenwood, for the work to be refreshed again.
This time she will be there to feed him. This time she will braid his hair, and he will not be left alone.
She takes that red stained hand and helps her husband up.
"I want to," she says.
-
The wide, shallow area of the Bruinen that the elves have been using to bathe and wash clothes and blankets is very quiet in the early evening. Aredhel feeds the fire there a little, to keep off the chill, before they both strip down and wash.
It's good to be clean and it's good to talk. They do talk as they sit in the shallows on good sized rocks. Aredhel tells Eol about the wedding blanket and about Nimmeth's fine new sewing needles. Eol tells Aredhel about Anudor's latest attempt at shortcuts to make nails faster and what the iron casualties were.
At last Aredhel readies the brush and soap. Eol kneels on a flat rock and she twists his thick storm gray hair, gathering it all back into a single long plait instead of the many working braids he would then wind together. It leaves the sides, which have begun to grow long, exposed.
Singing an old traveling song, Aredhel works the brush into a lather against the bowl shaped soap, then begins applying to the sides of her husband's head, careful around his ears. He holds perfectly still for her, his breathing the only indication that he isn't a well hewn dwarvish statue.
Once she is done with the soap, Aredhel takes the blade, and gripping the crescent shaped handle she carefully begins to shave.
She has not known a time when her husband did not have the sides of his head shaved down. It had been fascinating when first they met, for under the hair that grows there he has tattoos in blue and red and black, sigils and lines and swirls that mean good things and bad things and nothing at all. She had never seen anything like them.
She had never seen anything like Eol at all.
Now she knows that if the hair grows too long in those places Eol begins to pull on it, a habit from his childhood days when he begins to become overwhelmed. She had helped him with it before, in the early days of their lives in Nan Elmoth.
The strokes come back to her with ease, and she lets the blade whisper over her husband's head. She pushes down the tender tip of an ear with one hand to better access the hair there and smiles when he inhales sharp. She tenderly works down near the nape of his neck and lets her fingertips linger a moment too long. She wipes away the soap with a wet rag from the pot she'd kept on the fire and soothes the fevered flesh with a soft kiss.
When she is done, the sides of Eol's head are once again bare, and those lines and swirls stand out as proud as ever they did.
She gives him a moment of mercy and goes to wash the brush and the blade in the river. When she returns he has gathered himself enough to stand and finish dressing.
"Bedtime," she says, and smiles when the light of the fire catches the back of her husband's eyes and lights them up the color of aquamarine.
"So it is," he says hoarsely, and when Aredhel's hand touches the small of his back he pulls her down and nips under her chin. It's an uncertain movement, a little choppy. A question he would not have dared ask even a week ago, afraid of her unspoken answer and refusing to consider hearing if it was she who asked.
Elated, Aredhel responds by leaning in to pull his plait forward, letting her body rub up his.
Husband and wife leave the water behind, and neither can care even a little bit when the next day dawns- predictably- stormy.
Whatever Eol was expecting of Mae- Lomion's people, after his wife told him of the uprising, it wasn't quite the level of awe they seemed to hold in deference to him.
All referred to him as 'Honored Father' which was weird enough, considering how poorly his relationship with his son had deteriorated and how (in a world only he remembers, in a time that didn't happen at all) he once declared that Lomion had foresaken him, and would die the same death as he.
Some asked him about Nan Elmoth, and his doings in the court of Doriath. These questions Eol answered easily. He had decided to be a thorn in his brother's side regarding the decisions and cultures of Avari tribes and he had carried on that duty proudly. True, he was no potter of the Tribe of Snows, no official dragon hunter of the Tribe of the Red Hood, and stars knew he was no Kemdi to live in a riverbank and weave reeds, but he had been Eol The Dark Elf, and in him lay the concerns and views of all these groups and more.
It had been a hard job. It had been a job he failed at, sometimes, with the vastness of the cultures that relied on him. Still, he had tried.
Some of Lomion's people wanted to know about the years before the sun and moon. These stories Eol told more hesitantly, because sharing them felt like giving parts of himself away. He had to explain, however, why he referred to the Enemy as 'The Rider' and not any of the myriad of darker, uglier names that he'd been given, so it was sort of inevitable.
What Eol did appreciate about Lomion's people was that they wanted his help, and let him do his work. When negotiations with the town of Men had concluded and an area was walked in the woods that would serve as a new settlement for the arrived elves, Eol's forge blazed hot. The going was slow- there wasn't enough metal for the first few years and that first winter nearly did them in- but it was steady.
It was in the tenth year after the moles of Gondolin had settled into the trees beyond the town that Eol made acquaintance of a noldor in their midst.
There was more than one noldor, of course, but this one stood out a little. For one thing, he was shaped...a lot like Eol himself. Shorter. Stouter. He hadn't been much help for building but gathering and tending the wild gardens of the woods had come easily to him.
He was in Lomion's personal confidence, and Eol thought that was good. He and his son had not spoken much since that day he led Aredhel out of the woods on Snowdrop. The time wasn't right. When it was, well. They'd hammer out what they had, quench it, and see if it was worth saving.
So Lomion's friend, the noldor who tended the gardens, had come to Eol's little hall- which had become the starting boundary of their new home- to ask, hesitantly, if he might have a spade sharpened, as the other two smithies deeper in the trees were busy.
Eol agreed and as he worked on the shovel he said, "I don't believe we've met."
"We haven't. I've heard much of you; but that's likely no surprise."
"Oh?"
"Lomion told me you gave him his father name, but that perhaps it should have been yours, not the one you have."
Eol did not slow his work with his rasp. "My son is mistaken. What is your name?"
The other elf sighed. "I am Salgant."
Eol stopped.
"of the Harp?" he asked.
"Yes." Salgant said in a way that inferred if his ears were long enough to droop, they would be drooping.
"I see." Eol said, and kept sharpening.
-
Eol did not, in fact, see.
The uprising of the Sindar in the Vale of Tumladen had been, in his estimation, an inevitability. All it had needed was a spark, someone to bridge the gap between the oppressed underclass of farmers who had been in the vale when the Noldor came and the nobles and warriors who had done the oppressing.
They had gotten that in Prince Lomion, he of quenya and sindarin names, whose father was an avar who had denied the Call not once, but twice.
Eol didn't know whether or not the uprising was meant to be a part of the song. He had not told Aredhel, and had no intention of telling her, that the world had twisted around him after he was executed by her brother, everything reset. It had happened though, so perhaps it was meant to be. A father far away, remembered distantly as a stubborn fool rather than as a raving murderous madman, makes for a better origin.
All of this meant that most of the Moles were of lower birth. They were Gondolin's fire stokers and sewer workers, her farmers and her messengers, her butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Amongst those there were noldor of the same kind- armies don't march on warriors alone.
Salgant was not one of those.
Salgant was a lord.
"He came with us across the grinding ice," Aredhel said to Eol one evening, as he smoked his pipe in front of the fire. She didn't share his hall, not yet, but each passing year more of her things appeared, and the day would soon come, he knew, where he would have to consider adding another level and building his wife a room for her embroidery.
"He carried Idril, for a little while. You wouldn't think there's such strength on his back but there is."
"He seems a little like me," Eol admitted. "Built for burdens."
"He is. I think those burdens broke him. When word came to the upper levels of our coming, he bid everyone leave the House of the Harp. The doors were open when we arrived, and he was standing there with the key. I think he'd been heartsick since Neverast, and never really recovered."
"I take it the other lords took umbrage with that."
"Penlod was cursing him out until the balrogs broke through the city wall," Aredhel said. "by then we were all running." She sighed. "Salgant is no warrior, I know you can tell. Why he came with us after we saw the boats aflame I will never know. I am glad to have him here but he is a shadow to me now."
"Did you know him?" Eol asked. "Across the sea?"
"We went in some of the same circles."
Eol nodded and kept smoking.
-
The next time he saw Salgant, he said, "I have some questions."
"I may have answers?" the nervous noldor replied.
"If the memory does not pain too much, I would like to know more of my wife when she was across the sea."
Salgant tilted his head and then nodded. "Alright. Where should I start?"
This began the once monthly meeting of Salgant of the House of the Harp and Eol the Moriquendi.
-
Eol learned much of Aredhel's early life in those talks that he hadn't known before and each bit was precious to him. He redesigned her embroidery room so that her window faced west, and made sure to include a high nook for her threads, as Salgant suggested.
In return Eol told Salgant of court life in Doriath, 'what little I saw of it, as they didn't much like me being there and I wasn't very keen on them.'
To Salgant he told the story of the Silmaril, and the delighted noldor began a ballad of it that very evening. He was very skilled in music, and to Eol's surprise had a workable song in less than an hour.
On one of their evenings, Salgant gazed into the flames and asked, "Is it true your name means Lament?"
"It is," Eol replied.
"Old Rog said his meant Demon."
Eol closed his eyes. Oh, Rog. If he regretted anything it was never seeing Rog again, his brother in poor names, taken when hunting and long thought dead.
"It did. They said he was ill named, as well. I don't think so."
"No?"
"No. It would take a demon to survive Angband, and build a House in Gondolin when you had not seen the Light."
Salgant nods thoughtfully. "That's true. I hate my name."
It was delivered so matter of factly that for a moment Eol couldn't parse it. Then he asked, "Why?"
"Because it's the name of a child who grew into an elf who was nothing useful to anyone." Salgant said.
"Well." Eol said. "I suppose we'll have to find you a new one, won't we?"
-
"What's this about names?"
Eol looked up from his work to see his son, standing outside his smithy roof.
Lomion had not sought him thus in the twenty years since their arrival.
"What?"
"Salgant said something about names. You saying you'd find him a new one."
Eol shrugged. "The one he has hurts. Best to cast it off."
"You can't cast off a ill fitting name." Lomion argued.
Eol rose an eyebrow. "Can't you?" he asks.
There was a long moment of silence.
"It was not ill fitting." Lomion said at last.
"You abandoned it all the same."
"Did you give me a choice?"
"You made that choice. I had very little to do with it."
"Why didn't you come?"
Eol's mouth opened and he was determined to do as he had with Aredhel, yet under his son's gaze and perhaps weary with the weight of it he said, "I did."
The story whole came out then- the riverbed. The fight at the first gate. Being dragged before Turgon in chains despite Aredhel's protests, standing before all those noble lords who had seen the light of the Trees and whose eyes burned just as Aredhel's did, the pain overwhelming.
His desperate attempt to keep his son from that pain, Aredhel's just as desperate attempt to save him. The execution.
Opening his eyes in front of the riverbed, turning south, and walking away.
Lomion was quiet for a long time after he finished.
Eol filled that quiet with a shrug and a, "perhaps the uprising you tindered needed to happen, and my uncouth arrival and death threw it off. I don't know. the Song of our existence does not explain things to me and mercifully has been silent for a long time. But I saw what would happen if I entered Gondolin, and I decided against it. You wanted to be a Prince, I thought, so a Prince I would let you be."
He turned back to his work. "By my estimation, Maeglin, you made a good one. I did well in waiting to give your name. It was time we both needed."
Lomion left without another word.
-
It was coming on midsummer and the elves had come to the town of men to help bring in their harvest and celebrate. Someone found a harp and Salgant played to the delight of all. Eol helped light the bonfires and pass out the little iron trinkets for good fortune in the coming year.
When the embers burned low enough that couples could jump them, Aredhel hiked up her skirts and held out her hand demandingly.
Eol looked at it for a moment, then up at her, and smiled.
When they jumped, the elves all cheered.
-
"I have another name in the Greenwood, you know."
"You do?" Salgant asked. They were stacking wood for talans, an easy task and both elves were strong enough that the two of them could accomplish quite a bit without anyone getting in their way.
"I do," Eol said, setting his stack down. "There they call me Blackbranch. They've made me a god."
"They haven't," Salgant breathed. "Really?"
"Really. It's all that damned Silmaril's fault."
Salgant laughed. "You speak of them as though they were troublesome children."
"Weren't they?"
"I suppose. They were also beautiful."
"I wouldn't know."
"No?"
"No. I never saw one up close."
"but-!"
"The one I returned to the Princes before the great battle was wrapped in a cloth. I have no doubt if it had been unwrapped, the Light would have burned me into nothing. Perhaps Curufin would have liked that, but he never knew of that particular affliction of mine, so."
"Does my gaze hurt?" Salgant asked.
"A little," Eol admitted, "but there are fewer elves who saw the Light now. The pain is not so great."
"And you endure it for the Princess."
"Yes. I do."
-
It was snowing gently when Lomion came to him again.
Aredhel was out with the hunting parties and Eol was making use of his time, piecing together the loom he'd commissioned.
Lomion stooped without a word and helped him finish putting it together.
Once the task was done he said, "Do you regret our last years before we left?"
"I do," Eol said. "though I hope by now you understand why I made the demands I did."
Lomion frowned. "Curufin would have taken Nan Elmoth."
"In an instant," Eol said, "but he never got the chance. Of Celegorm I do not know; and as he resides now on this side of the mountains perhaps one day we'll discuss it like civil people."
"Why try and deny me Gondolin?"
"because it would mean losing your mother," Eol said, "and I could take one of you, or the other, but not both."
"You did not fade away."
"I am made of sterner stuff, and don't believe everything they tell you. I have known plenty of elves who have been bismirched and abused and who did not wilt into nothing. You met Rog. You know what he endured."
"He always said I reminded him of you." Lomion said.
"We are more alike than perhaps you would admit," Eol said. "and remember, my son, that when I left you both to Gondolin I betrayed my king, stole a silmaril, returned it to the Sons of Feanor under the threat of war and then was forced to flee over the mountains. I do not think that is handling it well."
That startled Lomion into a laugh. "No. I suppose not. The sons- I mt Amrod and Amras. They said they had been told to look after me."
"They asked if I wanted a boon. I had no plans to stay. I couldn't ask them to leave Nan Elmoth be; she was already wilding, preparing for my departure. I knew your mother likely wouldn't leave Gondolin again but a host so great might draw her brother and you. I wanted to be sure you lived to get home to her. They thought of themselves so highly I figured they could keep an eye on one prince."
Lomion laughed again, harder this time. "Salgant said you had no restraints on your tongue. I told him you never had. I'd forgotten."
"Yes, well. See that you don't again."
"You haven't called me Maeglin again."
"You don't use the name. I was making a point. Lomion you are, to your people. So Lomion you will be."
"and if I did want to be Maeglin again? If only here?"
Eol looked around his little hall. It isn't anything like the one he left in Nan Elmoth, but there are echoes here and there. "..then that is well with me."
-
"Amdirchyl."
"Pardon?" Salgant asked, looking up from where he was winding harp strings. He was teaching some of the little ones, helping develop an educational program. There weren't many children, as was the tendency of elves, but those few there were loved him.
It seemed to make Salgant sad.
"A new name." Eol dropped down beside him and began winding. "Amdirchyl. In Sindarin it means 'bearer of hope.'"
"I don't think I can bear anything," Salgant said quietly.
"I think you've borne enough," Eol said, "of things that are too heavy. Hope is both heavy and light."
Salgant looked thoughtful. Then he said, "I knew Idril's little boy."
Eol listened.
"He was such a good child. Bright and happy. He loved everyone, even Lomion who Idril always distrusted. The day the city fell, I wanted to look for him. To make sure he escaped- whether with us, or his mother.."
Salgant shakes his head. "but I didn't move. I was afraid."
"And you think cowards cannot carry hope?" Eol asked curiously.
"I think cowards do not deserve to carry it."
"Well it's good for you that I'm rather insistent on naming things, isn't it?" Eol asked.
-
Eol finished the circlet of Prince Lomion of the House of Fingolfin in the thirtieth year of the settlement. It was a pretty thing of silver and blackened branches, set with sapphires.
It was without question that the surviving Moles (as they called themselves, not Betrayers as some others called them) would not be following the bulk of the Sindar and remnants of other avari tribes over another set of damn mountains. They absolutely weren't following the Noldor hosts, either; that was a recipe for disaster, or at the very least political strife that no one needed.
It was in this need to find a new place to be- a safe place- that Aredhel Ar-Feiniel and her son Lomion Maeglin came to the wider country of what would one day be called Dunland with their people.
It was hard going. The Men of the area were uncooperative and suspicious, and a language barrier persisted until one of the scholars managed to work out a few linguistic rules. In this Aredhel had a better head than her son, and so she often spoke to the people they passed as they traveled.
In one area they were not so strange a sight, or rather the men did not immediately arm or flee at the sight of them. This was how Aredhel came to learn, in a small mannish town butted up against a thick forest that touched the base of the misty mountains in the southwest, of the Elvensmith.
The Elvensmith?
Yes, beautiful lady, the Elvensmith.
The man she speaks to claims the Elvensmith lives in the woods further back, down the dark path that leads out of town and past their timber camps. He is not shaped precisely as they are, being shorter and stockier, with gray hair, but he has been there all the man's life and all the lives of his fathers before him.
Aredhel asks a few questions, her heart rising in her throat. Is he marked on his skin? Oh yes, lady, with red and black and blue.
Is his gray hair shaved down on the sides and long on top, twisted in braids like ropes down his back? Yes, lady, to keep them neat in forging.
Do his eyes look like those of my guard beside me?
Not exactly, my lady. Your guard has your eyes, that blue- but the Elvensmith has gold in the black, and it shines in the dark under the trees.
-
Once, Aredhel Ar-Feiniel, whose name in her mother tongue was Irisse, was a princess of elves.
She was the youngest and most treasured daughter of Fingolfin, second born of Finwe who was High King of the Noldor; and through suffering and darkness she had crossed the grinding ice, seen two cities rise and fall, and loved in and left an enchanted wood where the sun never shone but the stars danced in a carpet overhead.
The elf she had loved- and left- she had not seen again.
Word of him had come, once in a while. When her son and the other Lords of Gondolin marched to war and returned, he'd carried strange tidings from her cousins, the Sons of Feanor.
"They were told to look out for me, mother. Father asked them to."
It was a boon they were all too happy to fulfill, for Aredhel's husband, abandoned by wife and son, had returned to the Sons of Feanor one of their family heirlooms. Indeed if the leys she heard were to be believed, he had ridden directly into their war camp and thrown it at the head of Curufinwe Feanorian, citing a favor owed.
(Aredhel believes it.
Eol would absolutely throw a silmaril at Curufin and with enough force to take his head clean off.)
Yet after this bold and brazen act, Eol disappears from all memory and telling. He did not return to Doriath, where he was a lord and his half brother the King. Nor did he go to the dwarves, who insisted to Elu Thingol that if his brother passed them by, he had not stopped to delve with them.
(Aredhel does not believe this.
The dwarves would never give Eol up to Thingol; they loved him too much.)
The taking of the Silmaril from the treasure rooms of Menegroth was a crime punishable by death for all the gem itself was a stolen treasure of a proud family. So wherever Eol went, it was well hidden indeed.
Good for him, Aredhel had thought, though her heart had begun to ache at their separation. He is at last free of obligation.
-
Aredhel will not let Lomion come with her up the dark path.
"It may not be him," she reminds him as they peer down the mannish road. "Your father is not the only elf with tattoos and gray hair."
"He is still the shortest," her son reminds her. "Mother-"
"Son."
He sighs. "and if it is him?"
She sets her jaw. "I need to know. The people have been given leave to camp; let them rest a while. If I am not back in three days, then you may come."
She tightens the straps on her pack and walks into the dark.
-
The Elvensmith is precisely where she was told he is, off a branching path where the mannish road stops. The woods are darker here, denser, and feel old.
She smells the smoke and comes around a hidden curve to see a fine, stout little hall. There is a cleared area in the front where vegetables are growing; a few chickens peck around a little coop. There is wood neatly piled and covered against the front wall beside the door. A horse observes her from a single stall stable, tail swishing slowly.
There is the sound of a hammer hitting heated metal.
Aredhel takes a deep breath and walks around the back of the hall. It is some twenty paces off, made of mortared stone with a roof of thatch. The fire dances and flickers and there is no doubt in her anymore.
He pauses in his hammering and a thick silence falls.
"....you'd best turn around, Lady," he says without looking at her. "this is no place for great and noble people."
"Then it is well I am neither great nor noble," she says, "for there are no more kingdoms that could claim me. You did not come."
"You did not want me."
She blinks. Somehow, she had not expected that answer. "I expected you to, still. You threatened to set our child in bonds."
"He did that well enough himself." The metal- a strap?- is set aside. The Elvensmith wipes his scarred hands on a rag and finally turns to look at her. His eyes shine in the dark under the thatched roof, the golden irises reflecting like those of a cat in the darkness of the sclera. "Why are you here?"
Aredhel opens her mouth.
She closes it.
"I want to know why," she says.
"Liar."
"It is where I must start," she snaps and he holds up a hand in acknowledgement. He leans back against the thick worktable. They could be back across Ered Luin, in the dark embrace of Nan Elmoth.
"You are a princess." He says. "you wear it even now, with as you say no kingdom to claim. A princess bears a prince, even if she doesn't marry one. I gave you both all I had to offer and it was not enough. I've even less now. So go find a kingdom, Irisse."
She feels her lips part in outrage. "You believe we left for money?"
"No." Eol says. "I believe you left because you were unhappy, and he went because he loved you. What made you unhappy I do not know, for you know well enough why I forbid you seek the cousins who would have ransomed you back or taken Nan Elmoth whole and killed me for the privilege. What I do know is I gave you all I could and it was not enough. I was not enough. I will not be enough now, and now I've not much more than the chickens and Snowdrop."
"Snowdrop?"
"The horse. A girl from the village named her."
Aredhel shakes her head. "I did not leave to-" she stops.
Because she had. Hadn't she? She'd longed to go home, to see the sun rise over the white towers, to hear the music and the fountains, to be a princess again and not just the lady of a hall leading hunting parties and making beds. It was true that Lomion's own majority and his wish to see Gondolin had spurred her.
"And so the tinder catches," Eol says quietly as she goes longer without speaking. "Well. As I said. No place for noble ladies."
"Did you miss me?"
It's an impulsive question but suddenly she desperately needs to know the answer.
Eol looks at her.
Really looks.
She feels the full weight of his hypnotic gaze for only a moment before he looks away.
"....it wasn't a fine ceremony with gold sashes and white pennants," he says hoarsely, "but it was real to me. When I spoke those words over the embers of the fire I meant them. Yes, White Lady, I missed you."
"Do you miss me still?" she whispers.
"Why do you ask me questions that lead nowhere?" He demands. "what does it matter?"
"It matters because we are here!" Aredhel says. "It matters because Gondolin is gone, and so is Nan Elmoth, because your son looked upon people like you in chains and bid them cast them off! It matters because those people, who only followed him because he spoke the tongues you taught him, wait even now for safety! It matters because I miss you!"
A beat. A bird calls in the deeper woods.
"No you don't."
Aredhel scoffs and cannot hold back the sob. "Do not call me a liar, Eol," she says, "when you can see I speak none-!"
For she had missed him, had missed him the moment they walked into the city proper as she gazed up at the towers she remembered and could almost hear him say, 'well that's a waste of space, and does it need so many windows?'
She had missed him when her son came to her, a year into their return, and asked her about the Sindar in the lower quarter.
She had missed him when one of Rog's people, grinning broadly, had said in a meeting, "Eol?! I knew your da when he was a lad! He still fighting everything an inch and more taller than him?"
She had missed him during the construction of the tunnels, the arming of the Sindar- he could make a better edge. He could find a better way to hide the blade.
She missed the feel of his body beside hers when Penlod got a little too into his cups and made advances, when Turgon looked at her uncertainly and asked, "if the rites are not like ours, do your vows still hold true, or..?"
"And what would you have me do?" Eol asks, and she can see that he too is crying. "This is all I am, Aredhel. This forge, this little hall, rumors and whispers. I cannot give you anything."
"I am not asking for anything!" she practically shouts at him. "You say the vows were real."
"They were."
"Are they still?!"
"Aredhel-"
"Let me be your wife!"
Eol stares at her, and she thinks, mournfully, there it is. There's the look of a man who didn't got what he didn't expect.
"Give me back my husband," she says, "that we may both do better."
He stares at her, for a long moment.
Then he curses, strides out, and pulls her into his arms.
It has been more than two thousand years, but still her body bends just as easily as it did. He still supports her weight with ease, and rests his face in the hollow of her neck. His shoulders begin to shake, then tighten, and when Aredhel curls her hand around the back of his neck he breaks down into sobs that bring them both down into the dirt beneath the dark trees.
-
It is well that Aredhel told her son to wait three days, because the first is finished beside the fire in the little hall where she hears the story of the Silmaril proper.
"I knew you threw it," she tells him. "Everyone laughed and thought it was an embellishment but I could see it in my mind's eye. Did you tell him to fuck off?"
"I did."
She laughs.
He hears the story of the rebellion- the Sindar who found Maeglin's hair shawl and recognized the embroidery, the building of the tunnels, the meetings, the fight.
"We'll never know if it was one of ours who betrayed the city to the Enemy," Aredhel whispers. "I hope that it was not."
"That one had ways of listening that no elf could defend against," Eol assures her.
What little she knows of the final battles she shares, and Eol tells of his flight over the mountains, and-
"Blackbranch?!"
He nods a bit glumly. "Aye. And what power it might have imbued in me I do not know, but.."
She can do little more than laugh again. "Oh, my poor husband," she teases, "to be known for a single theft you didn't even try that hard to cover!"
"You just wait until they give old Blackbranch a wife and then you'll be sorry."
-
At the dawn of the third day, as Lomion Maeglin and his oldest warriors prepare to follow the mannish road into the woods, a horse appears.
It is a fawn colored creature, carrying an elegant lady clad in dirty white finery, led by a short elf hooded and veiled against the sun.
The horse is led right up to the shocked lord and his people, and from behind the veilings a tart, raspy voice says, "let your mother wander off into dark woods alone, don't you know that's always how her troubles start?"
Aredhel Ar-Feiniel laughs, Snowdrop sighs, and Lomion Maeglin grasps his father close and cries.
-
-Many, many, many years into the future-
"Be welcome in the House of Elrond Half-Elven, stranger. From whence do you come?"
The short elf looks Elrond up and down, unimpressed. "Where's Elwe?"
"...the Graycloak is within. Have you business with him?"
"Dear," laughs the beautiful elven woman clad in white armor who had slid off the other horse.
"I suppose I do but my most direct business is with you. Sort of. My name's Blackbranch."
So I think in the blackbranch au Eol establishes a home somewhere in the deep woods near a Mannish settlement and to them he is The Elvensmith and his work lasts generations. You go out into the dark ato find his warm little hall and forge and he gets you fed and mends what's broken then sends you on home.
Sometimes he comes into town for festivals or to work on bigger things and he don't like the sun but he's friendly and quiet and the folk like him.
Generations of men live and die and he never changes but fathers tell their sons and so they are never afraid.
(After the breaking beyond the mountains they get more elves and things are complicated but the elvensmith is still there, so it's fine.)
