Work Text:
There was never a time Aredhel thought more about her mother than in the days of Lómion’s youth.
In her girlhood, she had taken pride in being as unlike to her mother as two women could be. Gentle, submissive Anairë; she who had taken Nolofinwë’s word as law, who had made herself small each day in the service of men far lesser than she.
How Aredhel had looked down upon her! How disgusted she had been, running laughing through Oromë’s woods in a dirt-covered white dress stained with the blood of the hunt, that any woman could allow herself to be so unmade. Could let herself be reduced to mere wife and mother, and to fight this unmaking not at all, and to so easily allow herself to forget who once she had been before woman became the only thing that mattered.
Aredhel rises now in the shadowed mornings of Nan Elmoth that are indistinguishable from its nights. She picks the strange fruits that grow in its darkened brush, and she washes and cuts them with a knife of her husband’s make. Lómion fusses, swaddled upon her breast.
Eöl comes when she calls him, and he eats, and he leaves.