#niphredilien

[tilions]

An ask game I see? Then I shall have to ask about Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé?

These honestly could've just been a bunch of hearts on white background.

Thank you for the ask!

#I would die for all of them if their lives would have been better as a result but honestly I would die for Obi-Wan the most. #also Obi-Wan can never have enough screen time #i need more #ask thingies #niphredilien

[yellow-faerie]

Nibenaes and Niphredilien Carnistiriel for Day 1 of @tolkienocweek

Nibenaes and Niphredilien, born five ages apart, are the two daughters of Caranthir Fëanorion.

Nibenaes was born in Beleriand to Haleth of the Haladin and Caranthir Fëanorion, and chose to live as an elf, dying to one of Sauron's servants attempting to assassinate King Gil-Galad in the late Second Age. She was reborn in the Fifth Age in Valinor once she had healed as much as she could in Mandos where she met her sister.

Niphredilien was born in the early fifth age to an unknown elven woman and the Maia Celusindi in Valinor in the early Fifth Age. She was abandoned by her bearer in a patch of Niphredils by Celusindi's river where she was found and adopted by Caranthir.

The sisters met when Niphredilien was just over her majority, a day after Nibenaes was reborn. There was initial frigidity between them as Nibenaes saw her sister as a replacement for a daughter who had been far from perfect, and Niphredilien saw her sister as the child Caranthir had always been remembering when he looked at her.

However, Nibenaes and Niphredilien came to see each other in a different light after a storm left them stranded together in the middle of a forest and they became firm friends in later ages, coming to be proud to call each other sister.

#I am incredibly pleased with this #I do so love Ibrithir's design for Nibenaes so that's what I used for her #and although Niphredilien isn't perfect I do still love this design for her #(we ignore the incident with the silver paint pen - I got cocky and live to regret it)

[ao3feed-tolkien]

The Sacrifices of a Queen [and the little things she takes for herself]

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/kHwpGo1

by Niphredilien (Yellow_Faerie)

For a long while, the tension in the air is from the Silmaril that hangs around Dior’s neck and the more and more insistent letters from Maedhros Faenorion demanding it back.

  That’s all people talk about, all people think about: when will the Faenorions, in their flaming red armour and with their golden sword, finally break and attack? When will they do unto Doriath as they did unto Alqualondë? When will they kill again in the name of their father and his jewels?

  They wonder and theorise and miss the orcs amassing in the North, until the attack is days away and inevitable.

Nimloth is the Queen of a doomed people - doomed not by the gods but by the ever encroaching war on their doorstop. With no magical barrier left to protect them, it is up to her and her beloved husband to keep them safe.

That is made much more difficult when during the evacuation they and a few remaining sindar in the forest are separated from the main host by Morgoth's early attack; thankfully (or not) the Faenorians save them.

Now, they just have to get to the havens and reconnect with their people.

That shouldn't be too difficult. Right?

Words: 6255, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: Gen

Characters: Nimloth of Doriath, Dior Eluchíl, Eluréd (Tolkien), Elurín (Tolkien), Elwing (Tolkien), Oropher (Tolkien), Oropher's Wife, Thranduil (Tolkien), Original Characters, Maglor | Makalaurë, Caranthir | Morifinwë, Maedhros | Maitimo, Celegorm | Turcafinwë, Curufin | Curufinwë, Amras (Tolkien)

Relationships: Dior Eluchíl/Nimloth of Doriath, Dior Eluchíl & Eluréd & Elurín & Elwing & Nimloth of Doriath, Oropher/Oropher's Wife, Nimloth of Doriath & Oropher, Nimloth of Doriath & Oropher's Wife

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Married Couple, Parenthood, Second Kinslaying | Sack of Doriath, Except not really because it never gets the opportunity to happen, Silmarils, Oath of Fëanor, Sindarin, Minor Character Death

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/kHwpGo1

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Tolkien #JRR Tolkien #Tolkien works #ao3 #fan fiction

[ao3feed-thehobbit]

Who on Arda invited the elf?

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/T1EgSWL

by Niphredilien (Yellow_Faerie)

The elf joins the company two days out of Rivendell.

It was no-one’s choice but her own and if it were up to Thorin, she would have been gone as quickly and quietly as she appeared.

Or: a very old elf survives the second age and makes that the problem of a Company of Thirteen Dwarves and a Hobbit

(Or: The author is a Silmarillion nerd who got into the Hobbit recently and thought - now who could irritate this situation into ending well? And produces her silly little half-elf OC)

Words: 1242, Chapters: 1/3, Language: English

Fandoms: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Original Female Character(s), Thorin Oakenshield, Bilbo Baggins

Relationships: Thorin Oakenshield & Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Elf-Dwarf Friendship, Well the beginnings of one anyway, Child of Haleth and Caranthir

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/T1EgSWL

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #the hobbit

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

Alright, I read your recent post and need to know - what is your interpretation of Maglor’s relationship with the twins?

askjdhslkjag my biggest self-inflicted problem in this fandom is that my take on maglor, elrond, and elros' relationship is so intensely detailed and specific i am forever tormented by none of the fic i read ever quite getting it right (from my perspective; i’ve read plenty of fic that presents a good interpretation on their own terms, it’s just never mine.) it’s simultaneously way darker than the fluffy kidnap dads stuff and nowhere near as black-and-white awful as the anti-fëanorian crowd likes to paint it, it’s messy and complicated and surrounded by darkness, and yet there’s also a sincere connection within it which mostly serves to make all those complications worse. angry teenage elrond is angry for a great many reasons, and the circumstances around him being raised by kinslayers account for at least half of them. there’s lots of complexity here, and i don’t see it in fic nearly as often as i’d like

(warning: the post... feathers? i already have an internet friend called faeiri this could be awkward - anyway, the post she’s talking about includes the line ‘everyone is wrong about kidnap dads except me.’ this post follows on from that in being as much a commentary about why various popular interpretations of both how the kidnapdoption went and the way people subsequently characterise the twins just don’t work for me as it is a setting out of my own ideas. i’m not really interested in getting into discourse here, i’m just trying to get my thoughts down. i’ve read fic with these interpretations before that i’ve liked, even, don’t take this as a Condemnation, aight? also this turned out long as hell, so i’m putting it under a cut)

i can never buy entirely fluffy depictions of kidnap dads

which isn’t to say i don’t read them! sometimes all i want is something sweet, for these kids to get to be happy for once. it’s not like i think their time with the fëanorians was completely devoid of laughter

it’s just. the pet names, the special days out, the home-cooked meals, it can get so treacly it stops feeling like the characters they are in the situation they’re in and turns into Generic Found Family #272

it soaks out all the complexity - which is the thing i am here for - and acts like oh, these kids were never in any danger, they were perfectly happy being abducted by the people who murdered everyone they knew, there’s nothing possibly questionable about this relationship at all

and... yeah. that’s not the characters i know. that’s not the context i know they belong to

i just can’t forget the circumstances that led them to meet

rivers of blood, the air filled with screams, a town ablaze, a woman choosing to die. every interaction the three of them have is going to proceed from that nightmare

(sidenote: i tend to hold it was maglor that raised the twins, with maedhros looming ominously in the background not really getting involved. it’s mostly personal preference, i’ve been in and out of the fandom since before this kidnap dads thing blew up and when i joined that was a perfectly standard reading)

(also the cave thing was a dumb idea, old man, if only because it implies beleriand had streams safe enough for children to play in at that point. the way it separates the twins from the third kinslaying is also something i don’t particularly vibe with)

probably my least favourite angle i’ve seen on the situation (edged out only by ‘maglor was actively abusive towards the twins’ which no no no no no no no no NO) is the idea that maglor (and/or maedhros, append as necessary) took the twins specifically to raise them

like, i get where it’s coming from, but it makes maglor come off as really creepy

(i have read fics where it is indeed played off as really creepy, but that’s not a maglor i have any interest in reading about)

(’mags 100% bad’ is just as facile a take to me as ‘mags 100% good’)

even if you’re saying maglor took them in because they had no one left to take care of them - i highly doubt they were the only children the fëanorians orphaned at sirion. idk, it always makes maglor seem much less sympathetic than i think it’s meant to

i prefer to think of it as more... organic? something that evolved, not something that was preordained. them growing closer gradually, the twins finding an adult who might maybe be on their side, maglor becoming invested in them almost by accident

and then the twins are so comfortable with the second scariest monster in amon ereb they frequently sass him off and maglor’s gotten so used to not hurting them he’s not even thinking about it any more. no one’s quite sure how it happened, but they’ve made a Connection

‘wait aren’t they a murderous warlord of questionable mental stability and a pair of terrified small children who’ve lost everyone they ever knew? isn’t that kinda fucked up?’ yup! that’s the point! complexity!

another idea i don’t like is the idea that maglor was an objectively better parent to the twins than eärendil or elwing

other people have talked about this already, i won’t rehash the whole thing. i will say that while i don’t think elwing was a perfect parent - someone so young, in such a horrible situation, i wouldn’t blame her for screwing up - i do think she (and eärendil) did the best by them they possibly could

this is one of the few things they have in common with maglor

something i come across now and again is the idea that sure, elwing and eärendil weren’t abusive or horrible or anything, but they were a couple of basically-teenagers with so many other responsibilities, there was only so much they could do. maglor, on the other hand, is an experienced adult who could take much better care of the twins

and...

first off, it’s not like mags doesn’t have a job. he’s a warlord, he has a fortress to help run, military shit to handle, lots of other stuff that needs to get done to stop everyone from starving or getting eaten by orcs. i feel like sirion had enough of a government there was plenty of opportunity for elwing to take days off and play with her kids, but in the fëanorian camp nobody really has the time to chase after a couple of toddlers, least of all one of the last points on the command network. they just don’t have the people any more

(seriously, the twins getting a formal education with tutors and classes and shit is a weirdly specific pet peeve of mine. this is a band of renegades, not a royal household; if there’s anyone left with those kinds of skills they almost certainly have more important things to do)

more than that, though - well, a quick glance through my late stage fëanorians tag should tell you a lot about what i think maglor’s mental state is like at this point. he is so accustomed to violence death means nothing to him, he’s lost most of his capacity for genuinely positive emotion to an endless century of defeat and despair, he hates everything in the universe, especially himself, he’s only able to keep functioning through a truly astounding amount of denial, and he covers it all up with a layer of snark and feigned apathy, which he defends aggressively because he’s subconsciously realised that if it breaks he’ll have absolutely nothing left

(maedhros, for the record, is... i’d say more stable, but at a lower point. maglor may interact with the world mostly through cold stares and mocking laughter, but at least his mind is firmly rooted in the present)

(on the other hand, at least maedhros lets himself be aware of what they are and where their road will lead)

which... this doesn’t mean maglor doesn’t try to be kind to the twins, or rein in his worst impulses around them

there’s just so little of him left but the weapon

he stalks through the halls like a portent of death and gets into hours-long screaming matches with maedhros and has definitely killed people in front of the twins

not even as, like, a deliberate attempt to scare them, but because when you solve most of your problems by stabbing them it’s pretty much a given that people who spend a lot of time around you are going to see you do it at least once

and sometimes, he curls up in an empty hallway, and weeps

... suffice it to say i don’t think elwing’s the more preoccupied, or the less mentally ill, parent here

just. in general, the fëanorians aren’t cackling boogeymen, but they’re not particularly nice either

no one has the energy left for that. not these isolated and weary soldiers at the end of a long losing war and the beginning of the end of the world. they don’t really bother to guard the kids against them escaping. where else are they going to go?

the sheer despair that must have been in the fëanorian camp after sirion, the knowledge that the cause cannot be fulfilled, that they are utterly forsaken, that they’re really just waiting to die -

it can’t have been a happy place to grow up in, under the shadow of loss and grief and deeds unrepentable, and the slow march of inevitable defeat

they would have had a better childhood if they stayed in sirion, raised by people who knew how to hope

but that isn’t the childhood they had. and despite everything i’ve said, i don’t think that childhood was an entirely awful one

yeah, see, this is where the other side of my self-inflicted fandom catch-22 comes in. just as much of the pro-kidnap dads stuff comes off as overly saccharine and simplified to me, i find much of the anti-kidnap dads stuff equally simplistic in the opposite direction

the idea that maglor and the fëanorians never meant anything to elros and elrond, that they had no effect on the people they became at all, that it was just a horrible thing that happened when they were children, easily thrown in the rear-view mirror...

that’s even more impossible to me than the idea that life with the fëanorians was 100% fluffy and nice

like, i’ve seen the take that elros and elrond hated the fëanorians from start to finish. they were perfect little sindarin princes, loyal to their people and the memory of doriath, spurning every scrap of kindness offered to them and knowing just what to say to twist the knife into the kinslayers’ wounds

... dude. they were six. hell, given their peredhelness, mentally they could easily have been younger

what six year old has a firm grasp of their ethnic identity? what six year old is fully aware of their place in history? what six year old would understand the politics that led to their situation?

don’t get me wrong, i can see hatred in there. but something else that doesn’t get acknowledged alongside it often enough is the fear

some of the stuff i’ve read feels like it gives the kids too much power in the situation. they’re perfectly happy to talk back to and belittle the people who burned down their hometown and killed everyone they ever knew, like miniature adults who don’t feel threatened at all

and, like, six. i can see them going for insults as a defensive measure, but it is defensive. it’s covering up fear, not coming from secure disdain

(and a lot of those insults sound, again, like things an adult who’s already familiar with the fëanorians would say, not a scared child who’s lost almost everything. why would a six year old raised by sindar and gondolindrim know what the noldolantë is, let alone what it means to maglor?)

(... i’m just ranting about this one fic that’s been ruffling my feathers for five years straight now, aren’t i)

i mean, i write elrond as the world’s angriest teenager, who snipes at maglor pretty much constantly, but the thing about angry teenage elrond is that he’s angry teenage elrond

he’s spent long enough with the fëanorians he has a pretty secure position within the camp, and he knows that maglor won’t hurt him from a decade and change of maglor not, in fact, hurting him

but as a small and terrified child abducted by the monsters his mother had nightmares about? he fluctuated wildly between ‘randomly guessing at things to say that wouldn’t get him killed’ ‘screaming at maglor to go away in words rarely more complicated than that’ 'desperately trying not to do or say anything in the hopes of not being noticed’ and ‘hiding’

(and i don’t think the twins were never in any danger from the fëanorians, either. quite besides the point that before they started orbiting maglor nobody was really sure what to do with them... well, they wouldn’t be the first children of thingol’s line the minions took revenge on)

(fortunately for them, maglor did, in fact, take them under his wing. by this point even their own followers are shit scared of the last two sons of fëanor, nobody’s going to mess with their stuff and risk getting mauled. tactically, it was a pretty good decision for a couple of toddlers)

more to the point, i feel like a child that young, in a situation that horrible, wouldn’t reject any kindness they were offered, any soothing touch in a universe of terror

in a world full of big scary monsters, the best way to survive is to get the biggest scariest monster possible to protect you. that’s how elros rationalises it when they’re, like, eight, mentally, but at the time they were just latching on to the only person around them who seemed to care about them

that’s how it started, on their end. two very young very scared children lost in a neverending nightmare clinging tightly to the lone outstretched pair of hands

as for maglor...

i’ve called mags evil before, but i see that as more of a... technical term? he is evil because he did the murder, he remains evil because he won’t stop doing the murder. hot take: murder bad

but that doesn’t make him, like, a moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain. he is deeply unhappy with the position he’s in and the person he’s become, and he’s always trying not to take that final step over the edge

it’s not that i can’t see a maglor who is abusive or manipulative or who sees the twins more as objects than people. it’s just that that characterisation is one i am profoundly uninterested in. i do occasionally read fic with it, but it never enters my own headcanons

horrible people can do good things!! kinslayers can do good things!! the fallen are capable of humanity!! people can do both good and evil things at the same time, because people are complicated!! maglor is not psychologically incapable of actually taking pity on these kids!!!!

it’s... again, complexity. the fëanorians straddle the line between black and white, which is a lot less sharp in the legendarium than it’s sometimes characterised as. it’s what draws me to their characters so much, why i have so many stupid headcanons about them. pretending they fall firmly on either side of the line is my real fandom pet peeve

and, like, this moment? this sincere connection between a bloodstained warlord and two children who will grow up to be great and kind in equal measure? i may not entirely like the direction the fandom’s taken it recently, but that beat, that relationship, it still gets me

so no, i don’t think elrond and elros’ years with the fëanorians were an endless cavalcade of abuse and misery. i think there was love there, despite the darkness all around them

an old, tired monster, and the two tiny children it protects

maglor never hurts the twins, not ever, not once. his claws are sharp and his fangs are keen, if he so much as swatted them he’d rip them in half. instead he folds down the razor edges of his being, interacting with them ever so carefully. he has nightmares of suddenly tearing into their skin

seriously, the power differential between them is so great, maglor so much as raising his voice would break any trust they have in this horribly dangerous creature. fics where he does corporal punishment always get the side-eye from me

the mood of their relationship is... i find it hard to put into words. melancholy, maybe, like a sunny afternoon a few days before the end of the world. three people who’ve lost so much finding what respite they can in each other as the world slowly crumbles around them

there are times when it feels like the three of them exist in a world of their own, marked out by the edges of the firelight. maglor telling stories of the stars, elros giving relaxed irreverent commentary, elrond getting a few moments to just be, all their troubles kept at bay

they are the last two lights in a world sunk into darkness, the last two living beings he does not on some level hate. he will tear his own heart out before he sees them in pain

he teaches them to ride, he teaches them to read, he gives them everything he still has left. the twins should never have been in this situation, maglor probably isn’t entirely fit to take care of them, but it is what it is, and they take what love they can

(maglor depends on the twins emotionally a bit more than any adult should rely on any child. he’s still very much the caretaker in their relationship, but that relationship is the only one he has left that’s not stained by a century of rage and grief. he’s obsessed with them, maedhros tells him frequently. maglor’s standard response to this is to try to gouge maedhros’ eyes out)

(that particular darker side to their relationship, where maglor’s attachment to the twins turns into a desperate possessiveness - that’s not something i think i’ve ever seen in fic. which is a shame, it feels much closer to my own characterisation than the standard ways this relationship gets maleficised. darker, in a different way than usual. horribly compelling in its plausibility)

however you want to read it, i don’t think you can deny this is a relationship that defines elrond and elros’ childhood. they were raised in the woods by a pack of kinslayers, the text is quite clear on this

but i’ve seen a lot of talk about how elros and elrond are only sirion’s children. they are completely 100% sindarin, they love and forgive eärendil and elwing thoroughly and without question, they identify with doriath over - even gondolin, let alone tirion. the fëanorians - the people who raised them - had zero effect on the people they grew into and the selves they created

and that, more than anything else, i find utterly unbelievable

look, i get what this is a reaction to. a lot of the kidnap dads stuff paints the fëanorians as elrond and elros’ ‘real’ family, and i’ve already talked about what i think of the idea that maglor-and-possibly-also-maedhros were better parents than eärendil and elwing. i think it’s reductive and overly optimistic and just a little too neat

but to say instead that elrond and elros held no great love in their hearts for maglor, no lingering affinity with the fëanorians, no influence on their identity from the people they grew up around, none at all? that after it happened they just left it behind and resumed being the same people they were in sirion?

that strikes me as just as much an oversimplification. it sands down all the potential rough edges of their identity, all that inconvenient complexity that stops them from fitting into any well-defined box, and replaces it with a nice safe simple self-conception i find just as flat and boring as declaring them 100% fëanorian

we can quibble over who they call ‘father’ (i personally find that whole debate kinda petty) but denying that it was actually maglor who was the closest thing they knew to a parent for most of their childhoods, and that that would, in fact, affect the way they thought of themselves and their family, elides so many interesting possibilities out of existence

(i’m not even going to get into the most braindead take i have ever heard on the subject, namely that because their time with the fëanorians was such a small fraction of elrond’s total lifespan it was like being kidnapped for two weeks as a toddler and had no greater significance than that. do you not understand what childhood is????)

like, i tend to think of elrond as a child as being very loudly not-a-fëanorian. elros is more willing to go with the flow - hey, if the creepy kinslayer wants kids, elros is happy to play into that in order to not be murdered - but elrond is very firm that he’s not happy to be here and he doesn’t belong with them

(this is after they get over their initial terror, of course, when they’ve realised they won’t be fed to the orcs for the tiniest slight. even so, elrond only really gets shirty about it around people he’s comfortable with, whose reactions he can reasonably guess at. naturally, the first person he does it to is maglor)

elros calls maglor their father exactly once, when they’re... maybe early preteens? this is because elrond hears him do it and immediately loses his shit. they have a dad, elrond says, in tears, and a mum, and any day now their real parents are going to come to pick them up and take them home

... right?

it gets harder to believe as the years roll on, as their memories of sirion fade, as they find their own places within the host, as maglor watches over them as they grow. elrond still mentally sets himself apart from the fëanorians, but it’s more of an effort every year. life in the fëanorian camp is the only one he’s ever really known. he can barely remember his mother’s voice

then the war of wrath starts, and the fëanorian host drifts closer to the army of valinor, and the twins come into contact with non-fëanorians for the first time in forever, and it becomes clear just how obviously fëanorian elrond is. he always insisted he wasn’t like the kinslayers at all, but he dresses like them, talks like them, fights like them

the myth cycles the edain tell are almost completely unfamiliar to him, he barely remembers the shape of the songs of lost doriath. even these sarcastic commentary and subversive reinterpretations he made of maglor’s stories - those were still maglor’s stories! he’s been trying to guess at the person he was meant to be, but it’s growing nightmarishly blatant how little elrond ever knew about him

instead, the people he was born to are as alien to him as the orcs of morgoth. he is a fëanorian, through and through

... yeah, elrond (and/or elros) having an absolutely massive identity crisis upon being reintroduced to his quote-unquote ‘true kin’ is another angle i’d love to see in fic that i don’t think i’ve ever come across. all those potential grey areas around who they are and who they’re supposed to be sound utterly fascinating, and i think it’s the complexity i hate to see elided over the most

i really, really doubt they could effortlessly slot back into being eärendil and elwing’s children. not when they’ve been surrounded by, lived alongside, been raised by the people who were supposed to enemies for most of their lives

they just don’t fit into that box any more. they can’t

speaking of eärendil and elwing, while i do agree that they both (especially elwing) get a lot more flak than they deserve, i don’t agree that therefore elrond and elros were never the slightest bit mad at them and fully forgave them for everything with no reservations

because, well, they were left behind. elwing had no other choice, but they were still left behind; it led to the world being saved, but they were still left behind. all the best intentions in the universe don’t erase the weeks and months and years of waiting, of a hope that grew thinner and frailer until it finally quietly broke

that’s a real hurt, and a real grievance. even if the twins rationally understand that their parents were making the best out of their terrible situation, you can’t logic away emotions like that. it’s perfectly possible for them to know they have no reason to resent eärendil or elwing, and yet still harbour that bitterness and pain

(i did write a thing once where elrond loudly rejects eärendil as his father in favour of maglor, but something i didn’t add in that i probably should have is that elrond later regretted doing that)

(not like, several centuries later, when he’d grown old and wise. two hours later, when he’d calmed down. but he was still legitimately angry at eärendil, because the one thing angry teenage elrond was not lacking in was reasons to be mad at the adults around him, and before he could figure out if he had anything less furious to say the hosts of the valar left middle-earth behind)

(it’s another element to the tragedy of the whole thing. in that particular story, which is mostly aiming for maximum pain, the only thing elrond’s birth parents know about their son for thousands of years is that he hates them)

(and he doesn’t, not really. you can’t hate someone you’ve never known)

not that i think they couldn’t ever make up with their parents! fics where elrond and his birth parents work past all the things that lie between them and form a functional familial bond despite it all give me life. i just don’t like the idea that there’s nothing difficult for them to work past

i don’t like the idea that elrond and elros would naturally, effortlessly identify with the mother they last saw when they were six and the people they only vaguely remember. i can see them doing it as a political move, i can see them going for it as a deliberate personal choice, but i can’t seeing it being immediate and automatic and easy

no matter how great a pair of heroes eärendil and elwing are, that doesn’t change the fact that to elrond and elros, they’re at most a few scattered memories and a collection of far-off stories. and so long as the twins stay in middle-earth, they’re never going to draw any closer

compared to the dynamic, multifaceted, personal, and deep bonds they have with the fëanorians - who, and i know i keep saying this but i think it gets tossed aside way more casually than it should, are the people who actually raised them, their birth parents must feel like a distant idea

and that’s why i can never buy interpretations of elrond as 100% sindarin, a pure son of doriath, with no messy grey areas or awkward jagged edges to his identity. given everything we know about his life, it seems almost cartoonishly simplistic

honestly it seems like a narrative a bunch of old doriathrin nobles trying to manouevre elrond into being high king of the sindar or something would propagate. it's neat and nice and tidy, something that’d be much more convenient for everyone if elrond did feel that way

but i just don’t see how he can. this narrative is easy and simple in a way real people never are, it ignores all the forces pulling him apart. elrond being uncomplicatedly sindarin with the life he lives and the people he's close to - that doesn’t make any sense to me

which isn’t to say i think he’s 100% noldorin, from either a gondolindrim or a fëanorian perspective. (i find it a little more believable, given, again, who he grew up around and who he hangs out with, but it’s still a bit too reductive for my tastes.) it’s also not to say i couldn’t believe an elrond who made an active choice to emphasise his sindarin heritage

it’s not how i think of him, but it works. i don’t have a problem with other people interpreting the complexities of the twins’ identities differently

i just have a problem with people acting like it doesn’t exist

in general i think there’s a lot untapped potential that gets left behind when you declare the twins, separately or together, as All One Thing

they’re descended from half the noble houses of beleriand, and they have deep personal ties to most of the rest. they belong to all of the free peoples even the dwarves, somehow, probably and i feel like that was kind of the old man’s point? so many peoples meet in them, to say they wholly belong to any one species is probably an oversimplification

they sit at a crossroads of potential identities, and rather than narrowing down their worldviews to one single path, they take the hard road and choose all of them. that’s what you need to do, if you want to change the world

and, to bring this back to my ostensible topic, in my estimation at least this mélange of possible selves does include them as fëanorians! it’s not overpowering, but it’s certainly there, and the adults they grow into long after they’ve left the host still bear influence from their childhood

nothing super obvious, nothing that wouldn’t stand out if you didn’t know what to look for, but there’s something almost incandescent in how fiercely elros reaches out for his dreams

there’s something almost defiant in elrond’s drive to be as kind as summer

as for who they publically claim as their family... honestly, it depends. while it’s usually more tactically prudent for elros to connect himself to his various human ancestors, on occasion he does find a use for his free in with the elf mafia, and elrond, code switcher par excellence, is famously the son of whoever is most politically convenient at the moment, which is rarely, but not never, maglor

(in the privacy of their own minds, well, eärendil and elwing may have been the parents elros was supposed to have, but maglor was the parent he actually had, and elros doesn’t particularly care to mope over what might have been. elrond, for his part, figures that after all the shit maglor has put him through, the least that bastard owes him is a father)

but honestly? i think before any of their mountain of identities, before thinking of themselves as sindarin or gondolindel or hadorian or haladin or fëanorian or anything, elrond and elros identify as themselves

they are peredhil, they are númenóreans, they are whoever they make themselves to be. that’s how elrond finally resolved his identity, figured out who he was and found something past the pain and the rage

he wasn’t doriathrin, or gondolindrin, or falathrin, or fëanorian, or whatever else. he was elrond, no more and no less

and that person, elrond, could be whatever he chose to be

... elros came to a similar conclusion, with much less sturm und drang that he’s willing to admit. being able to go ‘hey, i can’t possibly be biased towards any one of your cultures, because i’m descended from all of you and i was raised by murderelves’ makes it a lot easier to unite people around your personal banner, turns out

the stories other people tried to force on them shattered into pieces, and the peredhel twins were free to shape themselves into anything they could dream of

and as the new world struggles alive, these lost children of an Age of death begin to bloom into their full glorious selves -

i just. i love the poetry of that. despite every single shadow that hangs over their past, despite all the clashing notes pulling them apart, they harmonise it all into a greater, kinder theme, determined to make their world a better place in whatever way they can

they fail, of course, but so do all things. the inevitable march of entropy doesn’t diminish the long millennia they (and their descendants) held onto the light

and their growing up in the fëanorian host definitely had a huge effect on the noble lords they became. you can see it in elros’ loud ambition to create a land of happiness and hope, elrond’s quiet resolve to heal all the hurts inflicted by this marred reality

it wasn’t a perfect time by any means, but neither was it a nightmare. it was what it was, a desperate existence at the edge of a knife where, nevertheless, they were loved

even after years upon decades upon centuries have passed, it’s hard for the wise king and the honourable sage to separate out and identify all the conflicting emotions swirling around their childhood. they never knew eärendil or elwing, true, but they also never really knew maglor

not as equals, not as adults, not as people who could truly understand him. he disappeared into the fog of history, leaving only childhood memories of razor-sharp, gentle hands

it’s messy and it’s complicated and getting any real closure would be like shoving their way through a thornbush with bare hands even if elrond could find the shithead, and yet at the core of it all, there is light. not the brightest of lights, maybe, but an enduring one

that contrast, above all, that note of warmth amidst the shadows, is what fascinates me so much about their relationship. three screwed up people in a screwed up world, finding a little peace with each other

and the fact that somehow, it does have a good ending - the children grow up magnificent and compassionate and just, they become exemplars of all their peoples, lodestars of the new world born out of the ashes of the old - that makes it seem to me like this relationship must have contained some fragment of happiness

but, fuck, all the darkness that surrounds that love, all the tangled-up emotions its existence necessitates, all the prefabricated self-identities it can never slot into - nothing about it is simple, nothing about it is easy, and i find that utterly enthralling. especially how, despite everything, that flickering light never goes out

well, i don’t think it does, anyway. my take on this relationship is both complicated enough no one else ever quite gets it right and well-defined enough every single ‘error’ in other people’s interpretations sticks out like a kinslayer in rivendell

it is an entirely self-inflicted problem, i will admit. other people are allowed to interpret those complexities differently from me, and it’s entirely my own fault i lack the :waves hands around nebulously: to write my own hypothetical fic on the subject at a pace faster than glacial

still, though. i do wish there was more fic out there that engaged with these complexities. a lot of the common fandom interpretations of this relationship just sweep it all away

#ask #my terrible headcanons #elros #elrond #maglor #elwing #earendil #feanorians #niphredilien #yellow feathered faerie #putting your old url in the tags for archival purposes #post nyanyannya askbox clearout #ironically it turned out almost as long as the songfic that clogged up my askbox in the first place #and it is DONE #fuck this took forever to write #stayed up late just to get it out the door so i don't have to think about it any more #this is a long ramble and i'm pretty sure the end is just me repeating myself ad nausem sorry #i'll admit to a certain pro-feanorian bias in my interpretation #but i also don't want elros and elrond to just. live in a neverending horrorshow for decades #the silm's cruel enough we don't need that #narratively i feel like elrond being All Of The Elves is a good mirror for elros being All Of The Humans #but it didn't really fit the angle i was going for #bleck #let's see how many followers i lose for this

[sakasakiii]

Oh wait! Now I’m really curious - who are Curvo and Kano’s wives/spouses? Do you have headcanons for the other textual ghost spouses in the house of Finwë as well? I really love your art and your headcanons so I would be very curious to know!

hellloooo!!! thank you so much for the kind words, firstly! i'm so so honoured to receive such feedback from you eeee and not to sound like a creep your tags are always so sweet 🥺💓🥺 and likewise, I just adore your fics!! i've started reading A Guide To Raising Elflings in my free time and AAARGHHH i've literally been HOOKED this past week!! (very slowly, but a chapter a day keeps the dark lord away as i like to say heheh- i cant wait to catch up once TRSB is over!)

now to answer the question! i haven't had much time to do proper proper art recently, but I do have some headcanons lined up about ghost spouses! here are some doodles of my versions of Curvo's wife:

I thought it'd be nice if she had some correlation to Celebrimbor's Quenya name, so I made her a silversmith; additionally, I also like irony of names so adding 'anna' to her name was... well. 😌 in contrast to Maglor's wife, I like to think she followed Curufin to M.E and subsequently stayed by his side faithfully until her eventual death in the Dagor Bragollach, before he was forced to relocate to Nargothrond!

Most of my stuff on Maglor's wife are in this post and this other post with her hypothetical kids !! Apologies that I haven't had much time recently to expand... but! Your mention of other 'ghost spouses' made me think about Amarie, and from there I kind of went down a rabbit hole 🤔 I have some hazy ideas about - not to say Valar worship - but elves and servitude to the Valar in Valinor, so I ended up combining some of those ideas that I might expand on in the future...

so in tradition, here's a sketch page of these three spouses i have thought of so far!!!

thank you so much again for the lovely ask!!! I had so much fun going wild with these headcanons (plus it's a surprisingly good way of stress relieving?!), so I am very grateful you sent in this ask! I hope you have a lovely rest of your week-- I'm very much looking forward to reading more of your writing!! 🥰🥰

#rin replies #niphredilien #my utopia is knowing finrod and amarie got married and i hope they had many happy blond-haired kids the man deserves it #hair cutting in elven cultures is something i could go about for four ages #and perhaps ive been influenced by skyrim and the vigilants of stendarr sort of thing #but i think itd be hella cool of the valar had a similar sort of thing! #in valinor i mean lolol i doubt thered be much traction in M.E #curufin #curufin's wife #celebrimbor #maglor #maglor's wife #finrod #amarie #ghost spouses: the series #silmarillion #headcanons #my art #sketch dump

[quinthejester]

How about drawing a Maglor or a Daeron? (Or any dramatic elven minstrel really)

Decided to draw a Daeron, because I have a request for Maglor right after this one haha, also I haven’t drawn him yet so I had fun with this! I hope you like it

#daeron #niphredilien #silm #silmarillion #silm fanart #silmarillion fanart #the silmarillion #silm art #silmarillion art #dairon #my art #fanart #reply #art request

[absynthe--minded]

How probable is it, do you think, that animals run on a reincarnation system in Arda? Because they are shown to have some sort of conscience but their afterlife cannot be outside of the world because they were created by Yavanna and it seems improbable that every creature ever ends up in within Yavanna or Námo’s halls upon death.

hmmm.

so there's two options here, I think, and one is a happy one and one is a sad one, so we're gonna talk about it first.

The sad option is that no animals ever are reembodied or reincarnated, that unless they're explicitly magical like Huan they have ordinary lifespans, and regardless of how much any elven companion loves them they're never seen again. This makes sense, from a worldbuilding perspective, which makes me hesitate to completely discount it - you're right, their afterlife can't be outside of the world, and also animals are far more numerous than the various sapient races of Arda and are born and die much more quickly so Yavanna's or Oromë's or Námo's halls would be very crowded very fast. I'd give this a solid 30% chance of being how it works, though, because from an emotional satisfaction standpoint (a very important one, in my opinion, if you're arguing Tolkien canonicity; this is on some level supposed to be a feel-good world), the happy option makes more sense.

So what is the happy option?

That the vast majority of animals aren't reembodied, but that a select few do go to Yavanna's or Oromë's halls, and that's dependent upon the relationships they forged in life. Horses, cats, dogs, some birds - any companion animals for elves or for Men who will be needing their friends in the Dagor Dagorath - they get to hang out and wait for their people to either pop out of Mandos or show up to fight in the end of the world. So Rochallor, or Huan, or Beleg's dogs, will get to see their people again, and might even have roles to play before the end of the world. I'd put this at the 70% likelihood because for me it feels right? It seems like the most Tolkienesque option, especially for elves considering how rebirth is structured.

I would love to talk about this more though!

#replies #niphredilien #tolkien #absynthe's meta

[welcometolotr]

Hi! Would it be possible for you to do Daeron and Maglor playing music together?

somewhere deep in the third age when they’re too tired to hate each other anymore

#maglor #daeron #daemags #silmarillion #welcometolotr #lineart #niphredilien #but Dairon was then a boy strong and merry and above all things he delighted to play upon a pipe of reeds #hope you like!!!!

[tilions]

Curufinrod || Finrod x Curufin

600 Followers celebration - send me a request and I make a moodboard!

For @niphredilien! Thank you for your request <3

#tolkien #silmarillion #feanorians #arafinweans #finrod #curufin #curufinrod #house of feanor #house of finarfin #house of finwe #finrod felagund #atarinke #curufinwe #tolkienedit #my edit #silmedit #oneringnet #niphredilien #600 follower celebration #request #is this their mood? #idk I feel like it is

[yellow-faerie]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Maedhros | Maitimo & Maglor | Makalaurë, Maglor | Makalaurë & Original Female Character(s) Characters: Maglor | Makalaurë, Maedhros | Maitimo, Original Female Character(s), Mentioned Elrond Peredhel, Mentioned Elros Tar-Minyatur Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, kidnap family, Light Angst, Drinking to Cope, Arguing Summary:

“Oh sweet fuck,” Idralas says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You kidnapped two elflings?”

Maedhros glowers silently as Maglor’s face pinches as if he’s just eaten a lemon. “Well, technically, they’re half-elves, not elves, and kidnapping kind of requires intent for it to be well, kidnapping, so…” He trails off at the look she is giving him and sighs in defeat.

“Yes. Yes we did,” he admits.

A take on the moments after Sirion.

My entry for Day 2 of @feanorianweek​

#this has been sitting as a WIP in my folder for SO LONG #but posting it finally felt like the right thing to do #I love looking back at my really old stuff and this is definitely old #I think it's the earliest thing I wrote for the Silm fandom lol #Maglor #Maedhros #OC: Idralas #Silmarillion #Tolkien #Fanfiction #feanorianweek #Fae's Fic #Fae's Stuff

[procrastinationonvacation]

Hi! I’m always up for wandering the shores and lamenting my failures! (My recent tests have been fairly bad too)

Splendid! I’ll get packed...what type of sandwich will you be wanting?

#asks #also whotookliterallyallthenames says they'd rather a topical beach bc weather concerns #does that work for you as well? or maybe we can go between beach climates: topical in winter and depressingly dreary in the summer! #niphredilien

[ao3feed-tolkien]

On the Way to Amon Ereb (Returning from Sirion)

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/Z5jfEQU

by Niphredilien (Yellow_Faerie)

“Oh sweet fuck,” Idralas says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You kidnapped two elflings?”

  Maedhros glowers silently as Maglor’s face pinches as if he’s just eaten a lemon. “Well, technically, they’re half-elves, not elves, and kidnapping kind of requires intent for it to be well, kidnapping, so…” He trails off at the look she is giving him and sighs in defeat.

  “Yes. Yes we did,” he admits.

A take on the moments after Sirion.

Words: 1083, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Characters: Maglor | Makalaurë, Maedhros | Maitimo, Original Female Character(s), Mentioned Elrond Peredhel, Mentioned Elros Tar-Minyatur

Relationships: Maedhros | Maitimo & Maglor | Makalaurë, Maglor | Makalaurë & Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, kidnap family, Light Angst, Drinking to Cope, Arguing

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/Z5jfEQU

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Tolkien #JRR Tolkien #Tolkien works #ao3 #fan fiction

[arofili]

Could you possibly please do number 3 for Curufinrod?

3. A breathy demand: “Kiss me” - and what the other person does to respond.

~~~

“Kiss me,” Curufin hissed, and tugged Finrod down before he could even respond.

Finrod complied, but the moment Curufin drew away for air he pressed a hand to his lover’s chest. “What do you want?” he asked, soft but deadly.

“You,” Curufin growled, grabbing Finrod’s wrist and pulling him back until their breathing mingled. “Must there always be an ulterior motive?”

“With you, yes,” Finrod said, deliberately turning his lips away. With us, yes, he thought ruefully, for he knew he was using Curvo as much as Curvo was using him.

Curufin licked a stripe up Finrod’s cheek, making him yelp and flinch away, but that strong grip on his arm didn’t let him go far.

“If there must, then let it be this: I am tired and I am lonely and I am certainly not going to turn to my idiot brother asking to let me forget, just for tonight.” He spoke the words defiantly, but Finrod felt the tremble in his fingers, the ache oozing out of his fëa. He was being sincere, so far as he could.

Finrod let Curufin tug him back into a tight embrace, but still kept his mouth out of reach for kissing. “And your idiot son?”

Curvo’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Tyelpë deserves better than to see me like this again,” he said shortly. “Will you kneel to me or not, you snake?”

In one fluid motion, Finrod sank to his knees, tugging Curvo forward by the waist. “Certainly, my jewel,” he purred, “if thou shalt worship me as thy king.”

“Fuck you,” Curufin choked out, but Finrod knew that he’d be begging for a royal pardon by the end of the night.

#silm #silmarillion #finrod #curufin #curufinrod #my writing #my fic #tefain nin #prompts #niphredilien #answers #serpent king

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

Hi! So...Moryo as the nicest Fëanorian? (I completely agree with you I just was wondering as to your validation for it)

i’m not sure i’d call moryo the nicest one, but i’d definitely call him the least awful person of the brothers hellspawn. i tend to define awfulness as partially a function of murders commited, so mags and mae are automatically worse than the twins are worse than the middle kids, with the possible exception of amrod if you assume he got out when the going was relatively good. like i said in a tag once, the fëanorians just get worse and worse until they’re all dead, and the longer they live, the less there’s anything left but their very worst possible self

why’s moryo better than the himlad idiots? tbh caranthir kind of has the vibe of a bog-standard jerk in a family of psychopaths. if you cut out the stuff they all have in common (by which i mean the kinslayings) the worst he’s ever done is yell at people. i tend to go with the idea that he’s a lot better at working with others and making connections than the text is willing to admit, so while he is kind of brusque at the best of times beneath it he’s a pretty reliable guy, which is more than you can say for most of them. he doesn’t have the patience for anything, including the overcomplicated villain shenanigans his brothers get up to

there’s also - these things scale, of course, but out of all the fëanorians moryo is probably the least demonic. murder isn’t something he revels in, even against the orcs; it’s something you do because it needs to be done and you’re too angry for anything else. there’s something almost mannishly grounded in the way he views the world, a pragmatism that even at his worst keeps him from going full hellbeast, and can also pass for altruism sometimes? he’s the leader of the ‘maybe let’s not burn down doriath you fucking morons’ high command faction, and while a lot of his justification therefore is ‘morgoth’s balls we cannot afford a two-front war especially not now’ part of it is ‘didn’t we decide that alqualondë was awful???? i’m not the only one who remembers that right??????’ he does still join in with the murder, that is a black mark on his record, but he probably comes the closest to realising they could just. leave the silmaril alone. caranthir’s the least worst, at least partially, because he fell the least. ‘s what i think anyway

(the ‘nicest’ fëanorian, in an interpersonal sense, is probably either maglor or celegorm, depending on how bro-y you are? they would both rip anyone in their outgroup to shreds if they thought it served their purposes though. the one with the most ethical backbone in a pinch is probably amrod, and there’s probably some kind of epic tragedy in how he went from ‘guy who snuck back onto the boats in direct defiance of his entire family’ to ‘guy who allowed sirion to happen’)

#ask #caranthir #house of feanor #fics where moryo is anti kinslaying give me LIFE #you go evil logistics guy you tell em #i need to write more about amrod #and my conceptions of the twins more generally #amras is probably the feanorian i'd want to hang out with #he tries to do the same thing as mags and tyelko #y'know acting completely friendly up until they stab you #he's just way worse at hiding his actual intentions #caranthir on the other hand can't be bothered #with him what you see is what you get #niphredilien

[jengajives]

I very much hope you write more of that modern AU! I love it a lot. But someone’s death scene would be very nice as well - there’s a lot of potential for angst there

So I finally got around to finishing the next part of the modern AU!

Hope you all enjoy!

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

Daeron would probably still be pissed off if the salad wasn’t so damn good.

Seriously. It was so good it was making him question his entire understanding of Noldorin culture.

For a bunch of meat-eating metalsmiths obsessed with the artificial to produce a salad like this was almost unthinkable.

He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of saying that, though. His mouth was too full.

“This is delicious,” Maglor said next to him. The stubborn desire not to give his hosts the privilege of his visible gratitude immediately melted away and Daeron nodded enthusiastically in agreement.

“So good!”

Fëanor simply inclined his head with pride gleaming hot in his eyes. “The cooks are very good. We have this charming Avari on staff and she makes the most fascinating cuisine. You ever have Avari food, Daeron?”

Daeron nodded. He wasn’t sure ‘fascinating’ was a word he would use and if it was even acceptable to do so, but he could be polite for the sake of the salad.

“Sindarin and Avari food are very similar. Sometimes we do recipe swaps and things like that.”

Caranthir glowered at him from across the table. Before he could snap some microaggression in reply, though, his mother joined the conversation.

“You know, my partner is Teleri, so we eat a lot of traditional meals. I never thought I’d like fish, and I never would have even tried it if it weren’t for her. I think that trying food out of one’s cultural realm is a very unifying thing.”Fëanor pulled a face.

“Oh, that’s very cool!” Daeron said as he took another bite of salad. Maglor hadn’t been kidding when he said most of the family was gay. It was a welcome change, to be honest. “How long have you two been together?”

“We’ve dated about, oh, three and a half, four years now. She’s a lot of fun, you know. Very attentive. Loyal.” She didn’t look at Fëanor as she said it, but he still flinched as if scalded by the remark. Clearly he did not take well to even the slightest implication of character flaws.

For a moment, there was utter silence, except the sound of Celebrimbor’s soft babbles. Finally, Maedhros cleared his throat and tried to restart some form of cordial conversation.

“How are things in the lab, Dad?”

“Not good,” Fëanor said darkly. “I’m no closer to recreating the formula and campus officials still haven’t taken my complaints regarding Bauglir seriously. It’s unbelievable. The man steals my life work and murders my father and still everyone is too busy groveling in front of the other Valar to care. Disgraceful.”

Daeron nearly choked on his drink trying to process that entire sentence.

“We’ll get him,” Mae said in a voice that conveyed calmness very suspiciously. “Don’t worry, Dad. No matter what it takes.”

Daeron, having recovered from his brief coughing fit, managed to creak out a question.

“What is it you do, Mr. Curufinwë?”

“I’m a molecular geochemist.” He flicked something off his plate, rather improperly. “And sometimes a professor because I’ll lose funding if I don’t lecture.”

Daeron looked at Maglor for help, and Mags just shrugged.

“He makes rocks.”

“Stones, son. Precious stones mostly. Other types of geologic matter, too.”

“Yes,” Nerdanel added tiredly. “He does so love his stones.”

Someone stole his life work as a rock professor and then… murdered his dad. What?

When he remembered he should be politely paying attention, he tried to zone in, but the only things he could decipher were that Nerdanel and her ex-husband were now arguing and Maglor looked uncomfortable, so he just put his hand on his boyfriend’s thigh and continued trying to figure out how someone could murder a college rock professor’s dad and get away with it.

“Daeron!”

Slowly he blinked and turned his head to see one of the twins grinning eagerly at him. He had no idea which was which and, to be honest, he’d forgotten what they were even called in the first place.

“Yes?”

“We need your help, dude. What’s the capital of Ligma?”

The other twin smothered a laugh. Daeron stared blankly at the two of them, then glanced at Maglor, then back to them.

Are you serious?

He cleared his throat, speaking deliberately so he could think of his salad in between each word and remind himself this was all worth it. “I don’t know. What is the capital of-“

“Ligma balls!” the other twin bellowed, and both of them erupted into screeching laughter.

Daeron looked down at his plate and counted the chunks of strawberry until the quiet rage died down.

“You two are so immature,” Caranthir muttered. Celegorm gave his brothers a very un-sneaky thumbs up.

Six… Seven… Eight… Oh, I’ve bitten that one, looks like eight and a half…

“Why would I send you something for our anniversary if we’re divorced?” Nerdanel snapped, reminding Daeron that she was still deep in argument with her ex, who he was less fond of by the second.

“Because you miss me,” Fëanor said with such certainty it made Daeron’s stomach churn. Nerdanel laughed coldly.

“Fëanor, I spent about ten years missing you until I realized you didn’t miss me back.”

“I do miss you.”

“Sure. What do you miss more? Me, or your special rocks?”

There was a very long pause. No one else at the table made a sound until finally Fëanor creaked an indignant “You really can’t compare-“

“That’s what I thought.” Nerdanel took a hearty sip of her wine. “When you’re done being in love with a couple of lifeless rocks we can talk. Until then, I don’t want to hear it.”

Maglor looked like he was trying to melt out of his chair into a puddle on the floor. Next to him, Maedhros looked straight ahead with a glazed expression on his face, clearly not listening.

Curufin shifted Celebrimbor to his hip and began to speak in a lazily arrogant little drawl that mimicked his father’s with none of the elegance. “You know, Dad, my wife was just the same.”

Nerdanel made a horrible whine sort of sound. “Curufin, do not start about your wife, you know I’m still upset with you.”

“All I’m saying is that women are very jealous creatures. They have a hard time understanding the passion for one’s work and they tend to take it personally.”

Daeron blinked.

Lot to unpack there.

Nerdanel stood up, slapping her hands on the table. “I think I’m going to go.”

Daeron could not blame her.

“Son,” Fëanor said gravely as Nerdanel stood and made a brisk walk for the door. He fixed Curufin in a gaze like molten iron. “We have nothing but respect for women here. Apologize to your mother.”

“I was just agreeing with what you-“

“You did not have to do it in a way that suggested our companions, mothers, sisters, and wives are any lesser than we are. Apologize now.”

Curufin hesitated, shifted Celebrimbor to his other hip, then quietly and meekly said, “I’m sorry, Mother.”

“It was lovely to meet you, Daeron,” Nerdanel said without so much as a glance at her son.

Daeron nodded, still too stunned by the whole situation to speak.

Nerdanel left, utterly neglecting to reply to Curufin’s half-assed apology.

For a long time there was silence at the table until Celegorm cleared his throat and leaned over.

“So, Mae. I hear you’ve got a new special someone.”

Maedhros’s face flushed, and just like that the conversation bounced right back on track, as if the entire sexist outburst hadn’t happened and they weren’t missing a family member.

Daeron looked helplessly at Maglor, who just looked helplessly back.

#jenga makes junk #talk to me #niphredilien #fic #modern au #feanorians #daeron #maglor #daemags #maedhros #celegorm #caranthir #curufin #celebrimbor #feanor #nerdanel #not modeled off a real situation at all