Outsiders of Gondolin Mutual Defence League by Himring

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Prologue

Aredhel and Maeglin leave Nan Elmoth; their ill-fated arrival in Gondolin.

A drabble sequence, perhaps to be expanded.

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White in the Sunshine

He stepped out of the eaves of the forest and blinked, squinting over the plain. Behind him, he heard her breathe out deeply, like a sigh. He turned and saw her stand tall in the sunlight.

As a child I thought it was just the way things were. All our secrets were games we played, never a conspiracy against the jailer. That is what she wanted me to see, so much that she had lost sight of the truth herself, perhaps.

Only when I grew up, made my own bid for freedom, did I see how she had been held.

Outside Gondolin

In the middle of a wilderness of rocks, Aredhel stopped. ‘I must change.’ She took off the dun kirtle she had taken from her chest when Maeglin first spoke of flight and stood revealed in white again. Maeglin watched, bewildered.

‘They might not know me, in such a novel manner of dress,’ she explained. He detected reluctant shame in her face. It was unanticipated; his heart lurched, fearing she was ashamed of him, too.

She caught his wrist, strongly. ‘You are my son, my son’, she said. ‘But stay safe, stay behind me, until we are sure of our welcome.’

 

 

At last, they stood at the foot of the cliff.

‘Here,’ said Aredhel, indicating the mouth of the tunnel.

‘Here?’ echoed Maeglin, and although it was he who had urged the destination of their flight at the outset, suddenly he was in doubt, wishing that they could have ridden on together, fast and free in the sunlight, just the two of them, without stopping anywhere at all.

‘Is there no other way?’ he asked, hesitantly.

‘This is the way.’ She shivered, in her thin white dress. ‘A new life, for you! And I will be right beside you,’ she said.

 

A Cold Thought

Mother’s boy.

‘You shall be my guide and I shall be your guard,’ he had promised her but, in the end, it was she who had to guard him from attack, she who had intercepted the sudden javelin and the double death it bore—dead, for his sake, before she had even spoken long to those she had missed.

He tried to think only of her, not of the other, of him, but could not help knowing that before the hot anger and violence, there must have been another, colder moment, when the javelin’s point had been dipped in poison.

‘It is efficient,’ he had said, during one of their journeys, when Maeglin asked cautiously about the use of poison (because Mother had said only orcs…?).

What game needed hunting so efficiently, on the trail of his wife and his son? Not merely resentment flaring momentarily in the face of insult, then!

The poison of that knowledge entered deep into the bone, until Maeglin was cold, colder than his mother’s corpse before him.

‘If I had been able to say to Turgon, the next day: that is my father? But I could not nor fit my mouth around the words.’

 

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Chapter End Notes

Notes on White in the Sunshine

1 x 100 words in MS Word.
Written for the prompt "White Lady" at Tolkien Weekly.

As is evident from elsewhere in my stories, I'm inclined to take a dark view of "not wholly unwilling".

I do understand the motives of those who detect Noldorin prejudice and want to write a revisionist account.

 

Notes on Outside Gondolin:

Aredhel's white dress canonically allows the pursuing Eol to find their tracks again at this point and has drawn comment. According to my take on the situation here, she wasn't wearing it out of carelessness, vanity or other reasons that have been suggested, but because she was worried that the guards of Gondolin would not recognize her otherwise. Certainly, Voronwe later on is very concerned that both Tuor and he will be killed as they approach Gondolin (his anxiety is emphasized in the version in the Unfinished Tales), so even at this earlier date there might appear to be a risk.

2 x 100 words according to Word.
Written for two prompts of the New Challenge at Tolkien Weekly on LiveJournal: new clothes, new life.

 

Notes on Cold Thought:

Tolkien 100 prompt: Cold be Hand and Heart and Bone