Kindling by Anérea  

Kindling

I've tagged the warnings but it's really mostly implied (rape, abuse, suicidal ideation and suicide).

The scream lived inside Aerin, building and growing through the interminable years, although no sound of it ever escaped her; and yet that seemed somehow to burn her throat all the more.

She was the one they came to for succour, the bethralled women of the House of Hador. As Brodda's wife her life was no less enslaved, although she had the means to a little more and thus found ways to give a little more in aid. Furthermore, she always found the right words of comfort to give, or if comfort was not to be had then at the very least encouragement. She kept them going, kept their guttering sparks of hope banked, even as hers gradually extinguished.

Once, she had ventured to divulge how weary she was, how hopeless she felt, how much she longed to let go; had dared ask to receive a little of the same comfort in turn. Instead she had met with something like disbelief, something like dismay, but mostly she was met with disdain. "Aerin, you're the strong one," she was told, "and in any case you're a wife, not a slave, you don't need …"

So she held on, fanning that spark of desperate hope for them through her silent screams. For, in those intolerable times, what could choosing to stay alive be, but hope embodied, however faint?

Yet she knew. Knew that never again would she have the freedom she experienced before: to pick wildflowers in the birdsonged woods, to float in the soft turquoise waters of the lake, to revel in the breezes of the green meadows. Never again would she have the freedom of her own body. Once upon a time she had harboured a desire to see the ocean's waves slip upon the shore; now she felt only a longing to know the new beginning that comes after the end, beyond the shores, beyond the ocean, beyond the Circles of the World.

When Túrin returned and cast Brodda down, his burning wrath ignited hers. All her rage, all her pain, all her despair and grief. In those flames her hope flared, and as she burned she knew she would know peace once again.

Chapter End Notes

I saw a note that Aerin is possibly Sindarin meaning "She who desires the Sea", so I've alluded to that too.