Regencies of Child Kings by heget

Chapter 1

Ereinion was born in that last gasp of the Long Peace, the ironic child brought after waiting for a safe time to bring forth a new life only to have his childhood and early adulthood nothing but uncertainty and upheaval. Elven memory was better than that of mortals, so his earliest years were not consigned to the void - barely more than an infant though, he remembered his grandfather. The large man that gently bounced him on a knee, the deep voice never raised in anger praising a grandson. Ereinion remembered that love.

He remembered his father screaming down the halls of Eithel Sirion at the safeguards that his grandfather left in the inevitability of his death and the transfer of the High Kingship, shouting about betrayal and mistrust and how dare Aunt Lalwen doubt his judgment, that he would not suffer to be a puppet king under her thumb. Ereinion remembered, dimly with a young child’s absence of context but still he remembered, his mother’s blood-drained face as she sided with Lalwen against her husband. He remembered his father slamming council doors on Lalwen’s face and expelling any person that he thought loyal to her instead of him, how the halls of the citadel were packed with soldiers and commanders and eager-tempered men. All the Sindarin natives and peace-skilled craftsmen and statesmen replaced, the old men and women with languid voices gone. Ereinion in ignorance attributed the change of his first home to the switch from the Long Peace to wartime readiness. It is Lalwen's expulsion from the records and the memory of his father's uncharacteristic rage that clued him to the truth. He remembered his mother and Aunt Lalwen talking above his head, thinking him distracted by teething toys. He remembered his mother’s voice raised in anger, more terrible than his father, as she accused Lalwen of betrayal for negotiating with Lord Círdan. The young boy recalled his own fears, the tantrum of sadness and panic as his mother picked him up and crushed him to her chest, her heart rent asunder by the necessity of sending him away for safety. Only the earliest of Ereinion’s memories of Eithel Sirion were happy. Only the smiling face of his grandfather, the large warm hands and giant smile that crinkled his eyes into hidden crescents, the smile that tethered his father, mother, and great-aunt’s happiness and harmony.

Círdan had a wide smile that scrunched up his eyes like Grandfather.