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  1. Tags
    Summary

    “When they played in the caves, they were not Elwing-Elrond-Elros, mother and sons. They were three refugee children pretending to be ordinary children, feral in salt-stained clothes and their foremother's wide, watchful eyes. Up and down the shoreline, caves like these were claimed by Sirion's young to play in, designed, occupied and defended by children who understood that space you could call yours was temporary, that you took it when you found it and could lose it any time.“

    Elwing cares little for the forests of Valinor.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    977
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    17
    Kudos:
    54
    Bookmarks:
    12
    Hits:
    183
  2. Tags
    Summary

    "Do not make this little mistake in my motherhood a tragic footnote in my life, Maglor. Why must we define what living is like for difficult people in difficult places, as a tragedy? The true tragedy lies in the masking of little mistakes, the ensconcement of little lives in the language of the promising, the language of potential possessed and lost, of heroic deeds and terrible mistakes. Such words do not denote reality, they make reality feel like mass failure instead of proof of human lives lived under impossible conditions.

    Make it a part of the whole of me, a counterpart to my kindness. Do not tell them that I was the best mother in the world solely by virtue of my womanhood. Tell them Nerdanel looked at her firstborn, could not see him truly, and did not think to ask."
    _______________
    A ‘nonfictional fanfiction’ family history situating the Fëanorians in Prayers to Broken Stone, looking at the 'secular leftist' yet landowning and feudalistic Mappila Muslim family in Kozhikode between 1920 and 1980, interspersed with letters Nerdanel wrote to Maglor during her hunger strike.

    Or: why Fëanor set himself on fire after his swords were flung into the sea.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    15,345
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    8
    Kudos:
    25
    Bookmarks:
    5
    Hits:
    205
  3. Tags
    Summary

    "As the years pass, Gilraen becomes more confident that the idea of death no longer repulses Lord Elrond, that no longer might he find mortality a contagion, sinking into her as he does each night. She breathes easier, loosens her apron-strings, allows Estel a little more freedom, lets him stray farther from her sight, no longer so terrified that he might do something that would lose his father’s favour, might oust them back into the wilds to live and die short, fragmented lives, have him brought home horizontal on horseback with an arrow through his eye."
    ________________

    The torrid, scandalous, fifty-year long affair between Lord Elrond of Imladris and Gilraen the Fair as they raise Aragorn II, or Estel, the tearaway little miscreant and heir-in-exile to the Gondorian throne. Or: musings on the surveilled, sexually suspect citizenship that cities of sanctuary offer to those seeking asylum behind their walls.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    13,000
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    13
    Kudos:
    58
    Bookmarks:
    15
    Hits:
    442
  4. Tags
    Summary

    “Oh Elrond, you and I have lived long enough to know that ordinary people arrive at extraordinary cruelty by forgetting the past in perfectly reasonable increments as they plan for the future. I fear that the descendants of two children found sobbing beneath a bed amidst the ruins of their birthplace may one day come to lay waste to the cradles of another’s civilisation.”
    ___________________

    In Fourth Age Gondor, King Elessar is set to unite the Harad city-states under the banner of the White Tree, whilst Arwen struggles with her father’s legacy and her own mortality. But as the date for the surrender and subsequent transfer of power draws nearer, a Haradrim campaign of resistance and subterfuge ramps up in Minas Tirith, and with Maglor Fëanorian’s unexpected appearance in the city, the descendants of Elrond and Elros Peredhel find they can no longer ignore the reopening wounds of First Age Beleriand.

    A story of Harad and the West, from the Union of Maedhros to the King’s Peace of Gondor.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    5,060
    Chapters:
    1/12
    Comments:
    17
    Kudos:
    50
    Bookmarks:
    8
    Hits:
    459
  5. Tags
    Summary

    “When Vizieroy Mehrzād told Queen Arwen and King Elessar that the demolition of the Jud-Aman star tower of Middle Harad would be delayed by a day because the chief astronomer had thrown herself off its highest balcony, she took the news calmly, kissing Aragorn briefly on the cheek. She spent the afternoon walking in her temporary garden instead, thinking about how Elrond once told her that it had been the height of spring when Fëanorian warhorses thundered into Sirion seven thousand years ago.”
    ———
    Or: an account of a kinslaying, through the eyes of Arwen Undomíel.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    12,610
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    26
    Kudos:
    73
    Bookmarks:
    21
    Hits:
    609
  6. Tags
    Summary

    "Very few at the funeral understood any of that. To the mourners, it looked only as though I forgave Bishop Fingolfin in turn, and thus reassured them that the greatest of wounds to the heart could be retrospectively pardoned. Up until that point, I spoke only of his kindness, and so reaffirmed the foundational dishonesty so many of us in that room had built our lives around: that the father was ever waiting at the gate. That we all need the foundations of lighthouses gently gored into our hearts, for how else could we get to the gate? Without such incisions, how could we wayward sons navigate the remarkable wilderness of life? What more direction do we need, than the father’s arms opened wide? Who was Fingon now without the lighthouse? A man lost. A man free. And even so, a man bereaved."
    _____________
    April, 1972: unwittingly assisted by his favourite cousin Finarfin and long-time lover Maedhros, local dance-master Fingon drops a bombshell at his father’s funeral that leads to the filling-in of an empty grave. A sequel to The Admiral's Folly, set in the Prayers to Broken Stone AU but can be read standalone.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    28,846
    Chapters:
    2/5
    Comments:
    34
    Kudos:
    59
    Bookmarks:
    6
    Hits:
    610
  7. Tags
    Summary

    "But I believed that however thoroughly violence mars the map, there remained small territories it could not occupy, like the miller's daughter in Sirion who hid seventeen children in her cellar, or the Fëanorian soldier who looked inside and told his commanding officer that it housed only bags of flour. Even when massacres were framed as requirements, there persisted those minor refusals, those unrecorded divergences from inevitability."

    OR

    "My great-aunt Batshiba used to read me a story about an ancient elf who had a tail," Bilbo offered Fëanor placidly, before giving him a piercing look. "Was that you?"
    __________________
    Re-embodied into relative insignificance in Fourth Age Valinor, Fëanor, former High King of the Noldor and current lord of Formenos, is uncharacteristically obliging to a request for a tell-all interview with the editor in chief of Hello Valar Tirion's latest and hottest weekly magazine, well-known for its incisive interviews and its feel-good serial about a Haradrim soldier in the Shire. Unfortunately, said editor in chief happens to be Bilbo Baggins.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    16,609
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    34
    Kudos:
    109
    Bookmarks:
    35
    Hits:
    1,113
  8. Tags
    Summary

    The hand dealt to Eärendil the Mariner is a particularly cruel form of exile. The very same exile that Elrond Peredhel will spend the latter half of his life in Middle Earth attempting to re-enact, raising scores upon scores of mortal heirs. This form of exile relies on light instead of darkness. It strips away the merciful opacity of the world and lays bare all its intimacies, intimacies you can never participate in yourself, which show you exactly what it is you have lost with increasingly unwelcome precision. Some days, Eärendil finds himself begging the Silmaril on his brow to burst into flame and blind him for good.
    ______________

    From Vingilot, Eärendil the Mariner watches Maglor Fëanorian raise his sons, and reflects on how performance is a necessary part of survival.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    2,173
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    19
    Kudos:
    106
    Bookmarks:
    14
    Hits:
    699
  9. Tags
    Summary

    "It was only later, Elrond's hands on the hidden casket and Faramir watching the way he didn’t let himself hesitate, that rhetoric drained out. That the thing stopped being a half-cocked mission and became simply what it was: two half-men in a stone room, in the middle of the night, trying to carry the remains of brightness out into a diminished world. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Elrond reached in and lifted the skull with an indecent tenderness that made Faramir need to look away. "
    __________
    After the coronation of Aragorn, Elrond asks Faramir for his help in retrieving a relic stored in the vaults of Minas Tirith: the bones of Elros Tar-Minyatur, the first king of Númenor, Elrond's beloved brother and technically speaking, Faramir's distant ancestor. In return, he receives a new, clearly unhelpful yet strangely compelling way to approach the hole Boromir left in his heart.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    8,419
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    32
    Kudos:
    125
    Bookmarks:
    37
    Hits:
    975
  10. Tags
    Summary

    “Birds don’t have cocks, motherfucker,” Maedhros shoved Finarfin in the chest, then did it again for posterity, moving closer to him with every sentence. “Only three percent of birds have anything resembling cocks. Ducks have cocks, incidentally, but a duck is a Christian bird, isn’t it? Appam and duck curry for Christmas, isn’t it? You better not be calling me a duck, or you’ll see what I do to you missionaries trying to convert me“—he jabbed Finarfin in the chest—“dickhead, you have American cable in your big house but don’t watch Wild Kingdom? Bloody pedestrian. Birds with cocks! Show me one cuckoo cock and I’ll show you mine.”
    ____________________
    When the political rivals ‘Comrade’ Maedhros and ‘Daddy’ Finarfin are locked in the same jail cell as a pre-election precautionary measure, temperatures, tempers, and testaments clash as a commonplace contest of masculinity goes awry. A smutty interlude in the Prayers to Broken Stone AU which can be read perfectly well standalone, if you're brave enough.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    5,572
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    31
    Kudos:
    45
    Bookmarks:
    2
    Hits:
    440
  11. Tags
    Summary

    “Many things about Elrond seem odd, but they are simply concentrated manifestations of the human condition, a shared malaise compressed into a single Peredhel heart after the transplantation of its twin. We say we want answers about people like Elrond, but what we actually crave is watching someone wrestle so honestly with the impossibility of questioning a heart.”

    Or: "I do not think pubic hair can be considered ‘treelit’ by any means, Cel. Least of all the hair of someone born in Middle Earth as you were."
    _______________
    Or: Elrond loves Maedhros and Maglor deeply as his beloved fathers and conveniently benevolent captors. Still, he is not beyond spending his time in Valinor conjuring shadow-illusions of them to ravish Celebrian in the way she craves to be ravished, or using the moment to attempt a reconciliation with the two.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    4,062
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    14
    Kudos:
    43
    Bookmarks:
    7
    Hits:
    423
  12. Tags
    Summary

    "To make the choice a father should make if he wishes to be named a father, if he wishes to retain the title, to say yes, if I had the choice, then I would choose to not be homosexual if it means my son Elros would be alive today, it would require that I declare Fingon never deserved his place in my heart. That I stand with my back to the sea and sink our very lives as nothing but a shipwrecked fantasy. It should be so easy. A father must forever put his children first, before all. You know this, Elrond. But we were five years old when we met, Finnu and I. How can I cast those children from my heart?”
    _____________
    One night on the cliff-house porch, Comrade Maedhros tells Elrond where exactly fatherhood lay upon his list of regrets, and what exactly he meant when he told Professor Gil-galad that he "was not a gay, but a Communist".

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    9,334
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    22
    Kudos:
    58
    Bookmarks:
    3
    Hits:
    433
  13. Tags
    Summary

    "So perhaps I love you not as a brother should love a brother, or perhaps exactly as a brother could have, with all the complication and contradiction that entails. I love your brilliance and your cruelty, your certainty and your blindness. I love the way you and Lalwendë moved through the world as if it owed you glory as your birthright, any compromise a defeat. I loved you all, and I resented you."
    _____________
    A series of letters to the departed and exiled Fëanor, in whose absence Finarfin's long-held fixation with his oldest brother comes to the surface, and mingles uneasily with his sorrow at the loss of his siblings and his children.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    4,070
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    13
    Kudos:
    37
    Bookmarks:
    3
    Hits:
    445
  14. Tags
    Summary

    "If I could, I would reach past this land and towards the sea, searching for some old version of my Fingon, who exists outside the bloody tale of the Noldor in Beleriand, who can be mourned in isolation from all our other ghosts and all whom we helped make into ghosts. But my brother Fingon no longer exists in isolation. Dirges in war must be orchestral or silent: there is no in-between. Death was his reward, but not his alone."
    ___________________
    On a rooftop three days after the Nirnaeth, Turgon rehearses a tripartite address he's scheduled to deliver the following day: an eulogy for his brother, an account of their final meeting, and his own coronation speech, in one.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    2,825
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    11
    Kudos:
    55
    Bookmarks:
    7
    Hits:
    315
  15. Tags
    Summary

    "But there is one detail none of them have noticed, or at least none have recorded: in the upper left corner, in the very first panel showing Fëanor as an infant, Míriel's small watching figure is not looking at her son. She is looking down at her own hands, at the invisible needle, at the act of weaving itself, horror and disgust gnashing teeth across the pale threads of her face. As though she already knew."

    Miriel Þerinde sews a tapestry, puts on a show, and muddies the waters.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    2,878
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    13
    Kudos:
    44
    Bookmarks:
    6
    Hits:
    299
  16. Tags
    Summary

    "Those who remain move through quieter streets, and tend to houses which now stand empty. They tend ailing blossoms in daylight, in gardens beholden to the sun. And Finarfin tends to them in turn, this king of circumstance, this lord of loss."
    _________

    Finarfin encounters a persistence of bees.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    1,368
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    17
    Kudos:
    47
    Bookmarks:
    6
    Hits:
    281
  17. Tags
    Summary

    "Would you do it again?" Elrond dares, his voice breaking on the question. "If you could go back, knowing everything—would you still jump?"

    Elwing is quiet for a long moment. 

    Then she turns to him, face carefully composed, her voice near-inaudible: "What was the bride-price you named for your daughter, Elrond?"
    _____________

    The story of a monumental choice that shaped the life of Elrond Peredhel, told in seven unanswered questions, and an eighth asking to be understood.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    6,454
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    67
    Kudos:
    241
    Bookmarks:
    71
    Hits:
    1,930
  18. Tags
    Summary

    “For no war ever ends. Children born tomorrow are shaped by arrows fired yesterday. Celeborn’s daughter was born over a thousand years after the sacking of her father’s birthplace. She will live to the breaking of the world having only ever known a father who once watched his homeland burn and spent the rest of his life counting Doriath’s dead. Like all war-children born to a world that had already ended for their parents, Celebrían had to learn there were rooms within her father she could never enter, whole wings of his fëa razed to the ground.”
    —————
    A study of Celeborn, the Second Kinslaying, and his lost Doriath, from the First Age to the Fourth.

    Language:
    English
    Words:
    2,662
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    38
    Kudos:
    83
    Bookmarks:
    25
    Hits:
    775
  19. Tags
    Summary

    “There’s some sort of great cathedral within me,” Fingon had wanted to tell Maglor. “This vast, echoing hollow, the site of my father’s devotion. These days, there is only a single inhabitant. The vicar is dead and the bishop is nowhere to be found. Russo lives there alone, the final acolyte driven into madness, hollering irreverently, sloganeering and saluting, his self-destructive pacing desecrating every inch of the nave. The walls are worn thin, the windows collateral damage, and the foundations will crumble sooner than they should. But how can I exile him from it? How can anyone ask that of me? Why must I do such a thing? Cast him out? No. No, I cannot. It is a cathedral. It is a sanctuary.”
    _______________
    When he and Maedhros are obligated to attend a stranger’s wedding in Thrissur, Fingon finds himself navigating the differences between shame and embarrassment. A bittersweet vignette set in the Prayers to Broken Stone AU, but can be read standalone.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    4,438
    Chapters:
    1/1
    Comments:
    33
    Kudos:
    86
    Bookmarks:
    6
    Hits:
    477
  20. Tags
    Summary

    “The Maedhros who stands before his son is not one thing but many. He is a struck-down statue. He is a fading demon. He is a sword in a nuclear war. He is historical debris. He is the sum of a nation’s ruin. He is the first sunset of the Empire’s apocalypse. He is Elrond’s beloved Baba, who would find him under every starless sky. Archives will dissect him. Historians will redeem him. Writers will swallow him whole.”

    In 1937, notorious Indian revolutionary Maedhros Fëanorian and his brother Maglor, take in a British colonial officer's twin sons and raise them to adulthood. Decades later, Elrond Peredhel, trying to leave a family tragedy behind in England, returns to India during a time of political turbulence and finds that everything, from the national landscape to his firebrand father, the ineffable Comrade Maedhros, has changed. Chapter 19: Epilogue, Afterword and 'Alternate' Ending.

    Series
    Language:
    English
    Words:
    207,622
    Chapters:
    19/19
    Collections:
    1
    Comments:
    776
    Kudos:
    576
    Bookmarks:
    144
    Hits:
    14,067

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