The Skin of Your Mother Before You by gaydhros  

Returning to life after thousands of years in the Halls of Waiting is, invariably, a shock.

The shock of physicality itself is vicious; the alien strangeness of new lungs filling with air, the frantic pumping of an unpracticed heart struggling to find its rhythm, the clumsy contractions of muscles unused to controlling limbs. But this shock, at least, is quick to pass– the hröa knows itself, down to the basest level of every cell. It needs only a little practice before running and jumping and breathing all become second nature.

The true shock of Return— the one not even Nienna’s most gifted Maiar can truly prepare an Elda for— is the shock of stepping out into the brightness of a world that has moved on without them.

Thousands of years of change and growth. Thousands of years of dwellings built and cities raised and forests grown denser and taller than ever before. Thousands of years of inventions and innovations, of advancements in weaponry and gemcraft and metallurgy, of the people they had loved moving forward in their absence, finding a rhythm to life without them.

All of this is to say that when Aredhel steps out of the Halls of Mandos— new and yet not, changed and yet not— into the beaming, oppressive sunshine of an Aman six thousand years removed from the one she knew, she is utterly, hopelessly overcome.

She is brought to live with her mother and father in the home of her youth. Where else would she go? She never had a home of her own in Aman, unmarried as she was.

Her brothers— those of them who have Returned, for Turukáno lingers still in the Halls— have both moved on: Arakáno travelling always, rarely keeping still, currently somewhere to the south of Valmar; Findekáno in a dwelling of his own near the outskirts of the city, with Maedhros, which is an arrangement that seems to make everyone just a little bit upset. Aredhel moves into the bedroom of her girlhood, in the southern wing of her father’s mansions.

Her mother had not touched it, it seems, not once in six millennia. It was as though Aredhel’s girlhood had been frozen in time: the same rose-dyed curtains hanging from the posters of her bed, the same dark oak nightstands, the same shelves lined with the same worn books she had favoured in her adolescence, their spines cracked and their pages surely crumbling. If she looked out the window, Aredhel is almost convinced she might find the skies of Tirion gilded with the glory of the Trees in their mingling.

Yet outside it is the sun that brightens the sky, drifting low now towards the western horizon. Tirion is changed, grown more grand and sprawling, filled with new shops and fountains and dwellings with roofs that all glitter in the light of the dying sun. Its streets are teeming with people who have Returned, or who sailed from the East, or who were born into lives that knew nothing but this.

Aredhel looks around her at the embalmed remains of her girlhood, and it is as though the world that had once held her and suffocated her in its crushing embrace had been paused in her absence, waiting for her to finish living a life that meant nothing at all, knowing someday she would come crawling back.

It is normal, she is told, to have trouble adjusting. Findekáno, Findaráto, Ecthelion— they have all tried to comfort her with tales of their own, of how they had struggled in the wake of their Return and how dearly they missed the lands to the East, how long it took to fit themselves into the fabric of a changed Aman. It would be stranger, they said, if she was not struggling.

But Aredhel has known struggle before, and this does not feel like struggle. Rather, the feeling that has gripped her with claws sunk deep into her chest feels like resistance, bone-deep and obstinate.

Obstinance is something Aredhel knows, intimately. She had often been told by her mother that her obstinance was one of her worst traits— her refusal to waver, her unwillingness to yield, her insistence that she should be allowed to do everything her own way. Her unflinching belief that it was never her who was too large or loud or ambitious, but rather the world that was not large enough to contain her. This had been the crux of some of the worst shouting matches Aredhel ever had with her mother, some of them vicious enough to rival even the most serious of Findekáno and Turukáno’s adolescent fights.

Aredhel has not fought with her mother since her Return, though this is not for lack of trying.

Anairë will not rise to provocation. She refuses to be pushed, she refuses to meet Aredhel’s anger and blame with her own, she refuses to prove that she is still, underneath this new facade of tenderness and concern, the same woman she has always been.

No; Anairë, it seems, is happier and kinder than ever.

At first Aredhel does not want to believe it. It is a facade, a front; an alibi meant for the prying eyes of concerned neighbours, to show herself as the type of mother who places the care of her daughter above aught else. But then the first week of Aredhel’s new life passes, and the second, and the third, and gradually, Aredhel’s defenses begin to lower. Her mother does not slip up. Her sharp tongue does not strike forth with cruelty, no matter how Aredhel goads.

Aredhel had spent centuries coming to accept that she would never have the mother she longed to have. She had known, in her bones, that her mother would not change. Even still, Aredhel cannot help now that she wishes fiercely that this is neither front nor facade; that she can trust the hands that now reach for her tenderly, that they will not turn to claws the second she opens her heart. Not even death had been able to kill the small child living in Aredhel who still, after everything, reaches always for her mother.

And Anairë, for the first time in Aredhel’s life, is a person— real, flawed, and alive. It had been so much easier before to hate her for the things she had done when Aredhel had not yet seen it. She almost wants to hate Anairë all the more now for complicating matters. But when she looks now into her mother’s eyes she finds something that is less than regret but is not quite callousness, and it is unbearable.

Anairë carries a certain brightness now that she had before been lacking. She walks around more firmly tethered to the earth, more at home in her skin— as though, in the absence of the burden of her children and husband, without the weight of being mother and wife, she had found a way to again be a person in her own right.

It was not that Anairë had not been a person before. Aredhel had known, even in girlhood, that there was more to her mother than this. She was certain of it, because once, on the brink of her adolescence, she had discovered in the back of Anairë’s closet a dust-covered box filled with pages upon pages upon pages of sheet music, all written in her mother’s elegant script.

The composition of music is not for the women of the Eldar. Their love and their skill, it is said, are in the playing of the instruments and the songs that the men compose, rather than in the writing of music itself. There are those that try, of course; Aredhel remembers the time a peer of Makalaurë’s had performed a piece of her own composition at a harp recital. She remembers also, afterwards, the private scorn that had come from the mouths of her father and mother, from Findekáno and his friends, from Tyelkormo, whose callous cruelty had left Aredhel with nothing to do except laugh along with him at the girl’s expense.

But Anairë had been a composer.

All through Aredhel’s youth Anairë had played the piano, but only ever the compositions of others. The type of music one played to fill the dead space in a cavernous home, or plug the awkward lulls in conversation when guests were visiting. Once, shortly after her discovery, bursting with pride that she had found this new key that would allow her into her mother’s life, Aredhel had told Anairë that she should try her hand at the writing of music. She had been fishing for affection. Perhaps even one of those rare, tired smiles; the kind that seemed to say, Yes, Írissë. You have seen me. Thank you.

It had not worked, of course. It rarely worked. More often than not Aredhel’s attempts to earn her mother’s favour were precisely the things to make Anairë the most cross, the most cruel and cold. For a time Aredhel had been devastated, as she always was; left sobbing into her pillow, as she always did. But eventually, the hurt began to give way to fury.

How easily Anairë had abandoned her dreams. How easily she allowed Nolofinwë— brilliant, driven, ambitious Nolofinwë— to impose his desires over hers. How she allowed him to assume that she would give her life over to the enhancement of his, and how easily she had done exactly this.

It had disgusted Aredhel.

How weak, she had thought with scorn. How shameful for a woman to bend like a slender branch in the wind, rushing to conform, comply, submit. Aredhel would never allow this to be her. She knew better— she was stronger, more prideful, her will was fierce and as steadfast as iron. She would prove to her mother that a different life was possible. She would find it, and she would claim it for her own.

The fact that Aredhel would dare to presume she deserved more out of life only made Anairë all the more furious.

A certain amount of leeway had been granted to Aredhel in her early youth: because she was a princess, because she was young, because she was beautiful. But as she grew into her adolescence and nearer to her majority, the noose began to tighten. The restrictions were imposed. You may run with the hunt, Írissë, but you may not join its ranks; you may climb as many trees as you like, but you must be careful not to stain your dress; no you may not cut your hair, I don’t care that it gets in your way when you run. Braid it, if you must.

Aredhel had always been striking, with her white garb and her dark, flowing hair, always kept so impractically long. Soon the time she spent with her male cousins began to raise eyebrows, and her refusal to turn to more appropriate pastimes became a topic for gossip among the ladies at tea. From there Anairë’s questions about when she would settle down and find a husband became unceasing, and with them, her efforts to arrange meetings and courtships with the awful sons of Finwë’s lords.

It had been suffocating, and it had been cruel, and it had come— all of it— from her mother. This had been the greatest betrayal of all. Nolofinwë did not care. Finwë cared even less. It was Anairë who needed to prove that she had raised a daughter right; that she had performed her duty in raising a woman who knew her place.

So it is infuriating to Aredhel to think that her mother has learned these lessons now, thousands of years after it truly mattered. Where was this brightness before? Where was this spine when Aredhel had so badly needed a mother who was on her side, who understood her own worth and the worth of her daughter?

The Anairë of today, who has had six thousand years to thrive out of Nolofinwë’s shadow, understands her worth. She had allowed Nolofinwë back into the home they once shared— her choice, for once he left with the exiles and forfeited his place in Aman his home had fallen to her, and remains hers to do with what she will— but she had not allowed him back into her bed. She does not defer to him in decisions that would before have fallen to him. She does not allow him to tell her what to do, who to see, how to dress. There is a wicker basket that lives now beside the piano, and it is brimming with Anairë’s compositions.

Aredhel should be happy that her mother has found peace. But it does not change the years of her girlhood she spent looking up at her mother— Anairë, docile and deferent in the one moment and yet whirling on Aredhel with cruelty in the next; Anairë, quiet and small and ever eager to bend to the wills of men far lesser than she; Anairë, growing round and pregnant with a fourth child even after she had sworn that the third would be her last— and understanding that this was to be her fate.

Aredhel would marry and have children of her own. She would surrender and allow herself to become small, to become unpersoned, to be unmade in the service of whichever man owned her and the children she would bear him.

But Aredhel knew better than her mother; she was stronger, she was more willful, she was enlightened. She would not make the same mistakes Anairë had made. She would find a way to do it all differently.

It was precisely her reckless desperation to prove this that had led her straight into the arms of Eöl.

The day Aredhel learns of his Return is the day she flees Tirion and rides hard for Oromë’s woods. She leaves nothing behind, not even a note.

It should not shock her as much as it does. The Halls of Mandos are for the healing of the fëa, to whatever extent healing is possible. Eöl’s soul had always been black and twisted and vile. It needed no healing in death, because it had been ruined from the beginning.

He had been released millennia ago, she is told. He dwells now somewhere in the vicinity of his Telerin kin, in the mountains behind Alqualondë, no doubt having found some damp and starless forest or stalactite-infested cave to haunt. Alone, certainly, as has always been his wont.

Aredhel does not want to think about him. She does not want to know where he dwells. Or rather, she does not want to have to know. But she must, she must, for from the moment she learns of his presence in Aman every shadow in her peripheral has begun to morph into his shape, and every sighing tree carries his voice, and she is almost certain that if she turns back now to look he will be close behind her, gaining speed.

She sings her horse’s heart steady and pushes him to bear her away more swiftly.

No doubt exists in Aredhel’s mind: when Eöl learns of her Return he will want to claim her again for his own, if only to prove that he still wields the power to do so. Aman may have changed in the six thousand years of Aredhel’s convalescence in the Halls of Waiting, the doctrines grown more permissible, but the Valar are not radicals, and death does not break a marriage bond. Aredhel is still bound to Eöl as wife, and she will remain so until the uttermost breaking of the world.

He will come for her, this she knows. But he will not take her. Even in her madness of fear, Aredhel knows this to be true. He will not have her while she dwells in the light of Tirion under the protection of her father, he will not have her while the Valar, for all their flaws, still hold the rule of Aman. No— he will want her, but she will not be permitted to be taken against her will, nor kept if it is not her wont. And anyway, she would sooner kill herself a dozen times over before she allowed it to happen.

Aredhel is not stupid. She can be rash and reckless, but her recklessness has never come without regard for her life. It wasn’t as if she had been ignorant to Eöl’s capacity for danger. But at the beginning things had not been bad; things had not been bad at all. Eöl had been exciting and charming and quick-witted and fun, and after centuries trapped behind the walls of Gondolin, taking the risk of running into his arms had been like the first breath of clean air after a lifetime underground. Eöl’s danger, Aredhel had thought, was like a training sword; blunt-edged and fickle. Danger of the kind Aredhel had long been drawn to, enough to thrill but lacking the power or influence to pose a true threat.

Eöl had seen her fire, and he had been drawn to it like a moth to flame. He had been enthralled by her willfulness and obstinance, he delighted in the heat with which her blood burned, in her utter singularity and refusal to yield or to compromise on any terms but her own. And Aredhel, after all, had spent a lifetime convincing herself that she was not the type of woman who fell victim to any man.

Of course, the good days had not lasted. Men like Eöl— men who want to own their women as completely as Eöl wished to own her— delight in finding a woman whose spirit burns so bright. Women like Aredhel offer a challenge; a chance to prove one’s power, to reinforce the superiority of one’s will, to prove oneself strong and fierce enough to keep a lioness on a leash, and not only to leash her, but to break her will so utterly she would offer up her throat to be collared.

Aredhel’s will was fierce and as steadfast as iron. She had thought herself so much better than this. In the end, she had broken.

Under such conditions, what woman would not break?

Aredhel collapses onto her back on the ground in the thrumming heart of Oromë’s woods, her chest heaving. The tall grasses rise around her and swallow her up, take her into their arms and cradle her to the earth. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and slides her hands down over her face.

On a time, she had known these woods like the back of her own hand. Every tree, every fallen log, every fox den. But six thousand years have come and gone here: six thousand years of growth, six thousand years of the neverending cycle of life and death and decay and new life. Around her the mighty oaks and beeches loom and stretch their fingers into the heavens, mushrooms litter the mossy ground around their trunks and extend like tongues from their gnarled wood. Underneath the dense canopy of leaves all is dark; so dark that if Aredhel closes her eyes she might convince herself that she is still in Nan Elmoth, and Lómion is young again, asleep upon her breast, and it is not too late— she can do everything over again, and she can do it right this time.

Lómion.

The touch of his name upon her thoughts makes Aredhel’s heart ache like it’s cleaving apart.

Her son. Her son.

She has been trying valiantly to think of him as little as possible. She knows what he did, and she knows what came of it. She knows he lingers still in the Halls. She can think no more of it, the pain is still too near.

For most of her life, Aredhel had wanted no children of her own. Not if they would collapse her life into a shape so small it could fit on the head of a needle; not after having suffered the costs of being raised by own mother. In time, though, she had begun to think that perhaps she might want children after all, if she could have them on her terms. A whole brood of them, smiling and laughing and playing. Living proof that this, too, was possible to do right.

Eöl had wanted only one child. A single heir, a son to carry on his legacy. And Aredhel had acquiesced. Her stomach grew round and heavy with their child, and for twelve long months she was terrified, nearly to the point of paralysis, that she might bear him a daughter.

She had hated herself for thinking it. She knew what it was to be resented by her mother for daring to be born a girl. Her life, and the life of her mother, had been eclipsed by the looming shadow of Nolofinwë’s half brother— Fëanáro and his endless procession of boys— and of Nolofinwë’s drive to best him in all things. Nerdanel, the wife of Fëanáro, bore to him seven children, each and every one of them sons. Anairë, ever desperate to be the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect woman, could bear Nolofinwë four children only in the end, and of them, three boys.

It had never been that Aredhel had been unloved by her father, or even by her mother. It was that her very existence was proof of Anairë’s failure. Aredhel had been her most difficult pregnancy; she was told this in her youth a hundred times over. Bringing Aredhel into the world had cost her mother dearly in body and spirit, over grueling days of labour and in the years that followed which grew heavy with the fog of melancholy. All of that pain, all of that sacrifice— and she had not even borne a son.

And so it had shamed Aredhel deeply to spend her pregnancy praying to gods who had long-since abandoned her that her body would bear a son. But Eöl wanted an heir— Eöl wanted only an heir. In the end, Aredhel had not been wrong to fear what he might be capable of when driven to wrath and desperation.

Aredhel’s pregnancy, like her mother’s, had not been easy. It had been painful and taxing on her body and mind, and on her spirit most of all, and by the end of it she was weak, and afraid. On the third day of her labour, crying out with pain and frustration as Eöl’s servants lifted water to her lips and dabbed a cool cloth to her forehead, Aredhel had, for the first time in her adult life, longed desperately for her mother.

It should have been her mother at her bedside. It should have been her mother there squeezing her hand and kissing tenderly her forehead. It should have been her mother bidding her drink, and telling her to eat what she could, for she would need her strength. It should have been her mother stroking her sweaty hair and murmuring that she was doing well, whispering that she was nearly there, that she need only be strong a little while longer. That she was proud of her— so very proud.

Aredhel cannot remember if she has ever received these comforts from her mother, even once in her life. Deep in her mind she carries memories of Anairë sitting on the edge of her bed and rubbing her back while she sobbed from a nightmare, or bending lovingly to kiss her forehead after she fell and cut her knee. But these memories are hazy with the fog of early childhood, and it has become impossible to tell whether they are true recollections of events that have passed, or rather things she had longed for so much as a girl she had managed to convince herself that they happened. More than likely, they are memories of her wet nurse with her mother’s face stitched on top. Sometimes Aredhel just wants something so fiercely there is nothing to do except pretend.

And so pushing, pushing, squeezing the hand of Eöl’s servant so hard it is a miracle she did not break bone, she had wept and begged for her mother. It was an unbearable truth, and one she later struggled to accept even in the privacy of her mind. And then afterwards another truth had come, one infinitely more bitter and ugly and wretched than the first: when Eöl came at last as Aredhel lay exhausted upon the bed, he had lifted their child into his arms— the infant swaddled and sleeping and so impossibly small, an heir, a son— and he had smiled, and Aredhel had thought only:

I won.

Aredhel pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes so hard she sees stars. She takes an awful, gasping breath. The thread that keeps her fëa tethered to her hröa is still too new, too fragile; she fears any longer with this pain and her spirit will surely cleave from her body.

Lómion. Lómion. It is the only thing she can think. Oh, the pain her child had wrought. The death, the devastation.

She had watched Eöl’s claws sinking into him. Nan Elmoth was no place to raise a child, in the absence of sun and stars and peers, anything at all outside the tiny world Eöl had curated. Aredhel had been relieved when Eöl began taking Lómion on his journeys to Nogrod, if only because he was getting out into the world and encountering different people, learning to socialize outside the bounds of his family and their servants.

Even then she had known it to be wishful thinking. Even then, she had known it would not be enough. He was Eöl’s son. Eöl’s sickness was in him.

Aredhel had seen the writing on the wall. She had tried to get them both out— away from the darkness of Nan Elmoth, away from Eöl and his bitterness, his cruelty, his lust for power. Gondolin, Aredhel thought, would heal her son. There he would dwell in the light, surrounded by the beauty of Tirion of old; there he would learn honour and nobility from the upright lords of the Noldor; there he would flourish, and come into his own. All of these things she had desperately wanted to believe. She clung to them, even as she lay dying. But it had been too late.

Aredhel stumbles to her feet and staggers unseeing through the thickness of the woods. Towering beeches rise around her, cropping up out of nowhere. She runs face-first through clinging walls of lichen, she snags her hair in jagged branches and curses as she pulls herself free.

She had failed her child, in the worst way a child could be failed. If she had gotten Lómion out sooner from beneath Eöl’s thumb, if she had taught him better, if she had not been so arrogant and so foolish as to be ensnared by Eöl in the first place—

Aredhel stumbles and falls to her knees, right at the edge of a dark pool.

She blinks. The shock of recognition knocks her out of her spiraling thoughts. Her chest heaving, her face wet with tears, she looks around her.

Aredhel knows this place. It is changed, as all things are— the flowing river the lake once fed has been eaten away by time, and the water is no longer dappled with silver and gold light, for the spotlight that once broke through the canopy of leaves overhead, the only light for miles, has been covered over by new growth. A million tiny deaths have blurred its margins, but still it teems with life— moss and algae growing over stones, foliage shaping itself into damp homes that have borne witness to six hundred generations of bullfrogs. It is the lake she once knew; Aredhel used to swim in these waters with Tyelkormo, a lifetime ago.

She swallows hard. She tries to find the permeable edges of her being and pull herself back into the shape of a person. She begins the long and arduous task of collecting herself. As she does, gradually, and the oppressive haze of shame recedes a little, she is able to think more clearly.

The agonizing truth of the matter is that she cannot possibly know what might have happened had she made different choices. Tears unnumbered ye shall shed. Perhaps her fate, and the fate of any child she bore, had been written in ink from the moment she fell in behind her father on the wastes of Araman and refused to turn back in shame. And Lómion… Lómion had been grown. He had been a lord high in Turgon’s regard, a fearsome warrior, a leader in his own right. He had made his own choices. She cannot bear their weight.

Aredhel had done for her child all that she could. She had fought for him, she had tried desperately to give him a chance. She had died for him, and she would do it again now without a moment’s hesitation, even knowing full well what would come of it. Does that make her a monster? Or just a mother? Is there a difference?

Aredhel kneels upon the soft moss and bends over what is left of this lake of her girlhood to splash water in her face. She scrubs away the salt of her tears, dries her face with her sleeve. At last, she looks down into the water that has held her a hundred times over. Stray locks of hair spill over each shoulder and fall to just barely graze the surface, sending out gentle ripples that fade and give way to the reflection of a woman she does not recognize.

The woman wears her skin and her face. She is Aredhel, but she is Aredhel-who-was: Aredhel with her ears intact and untouched by frostbite, Aredhel with her skin soft and unblemished by the scars of battle and childhood misadventure, Aredhel untouched by time, untouched by life. The woman looking back at her from the pool might as well still dwell beneath the glory of the Trees, for all that she lacks proof of ever having lived a life at all. She is a woman out of time; incongruous with the changed world around her.

This skin she wears does not fit. There is not enough room inside for both Aredhel-who-was and Aredhel-who-is to exist together without bursting it at the seams.

Aredhel sinks back onto her knees with her heart in her throat. Her hair catches the quiet breeze and billows behind her. She closes her eyes.

She has been so many things to so many people in her life, and in her death. She has been even more things only to herself, a thousand versions of her no one else has ever known. She cannot be Aredhel-who-is in the body of Aredhel-who-was, youthful and unchanged and languishing in the bedroom of her girlhood. She is more; she has to be more. She cannot bear not to be more. If it must be her doom to be bound to this world until its breaking, then she refuses to spend her days miserable. She will find happiness again, even if it means having to claw it out of herself with nails broken and bloodied.

Aredhel moves without thinking. She removes her circlet and clips it to her belt at the same moment her other hand reaches for her blade. She grabs her hair in her fist. She holds it taut.

With one strong, sweeping pull of the blade, she cuts.

It comes off easily, shorn in the space of one heartbeat and the next. A sob escapes her, as though a hand had reached down her throat and pulled it up from the very depths of her being. A weight lifts. She gasps, and it is the first full breath she has taken in this life.

With an unflinching hand Aredhel moves to set her hair down on the grass beside her. She leans over the pool again, and the Aredhel who looks back moves as she moves, raising the blade to her scalp. Piece by careful piece she shears it all off, nearly down to the skin. And when all is said and done she can only stare, and stare, and slide her hands over her skull.

Something like a smile finds its way onto her face. It is not quite right; the stretch of it is alien, new muscles pulling in ways they have not yet been asked to move. But the smile is hers. This, she thinks. This life is mine. I will make it my own if it kills me.

At last, she picks up her hair from where it is coiled on the grass and gets to her feet. She steps away from the pool to hold it out in her fist, her arm extended, and watches the length of dark waves spill nearly all the way to the forest floor. She stares at it in disdain.

Dead weight. All of it.

For a long while she considers burning it. In the end, though, she carries it to a nearby tree and tucks it neatly into the cradle of two gnarled branches, to be claimed by the birds and used for their nests. Soon it will decay and be claimed by the earth, broken down and changed into something new entirely. Now, though, at least for a time, it will find new life.

Chapter End Notes

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