Meril was one of those fleshing-out of textual ghosts that I had established and developed mentally for years but had never actually written into a fic, so writing her has been a joy. And I definitely wanted to explore the network of relationships and governance and history in Hithlum, because they all connect through her and her work. In some ways she is a proto-Elwing or Elrond or even Gil-galad, the last scion of local royalty having to cobble together new alliances and old ones that have new people in leadership roles.

Morben is just the Sindarin version of 'Avari' - though to be very technical, once this Avari group allied themselves with the Sindar and have committed themselves to also actively resisting Morgoth, to the Sindar they would no longer count as Morben/Avari but be fully Eldar, as the Sindar unlike the Noldor and other Amanyar elves don't categorize elven groups solely by their strict origins and history but on the current political position. I'll handwave it that this is the early days and Meril is influenced by her in-laws and that pre-Second Battle the Tatyar Avari would have still been 'Morben' to Meril. Or linguistic tomfoolery, in that she's using a homonym Morben to mean 'People of Morwë'. And yes, I never confirm it outright in either this fic or Hound of Morwë, but Mornacu ethnically would be counted as Nelyar, but not culturally. His parents (or at least his father) were the equivalent of serfs in the Tatyar city back in Cuiniénen, and Morwë's extended family group as well as the unrelated-by-blood Mornacu are the first splinter group post-Great Journey to break away from the Tatyar city.

For the Avarin groups I decided that I liked the mirror symmetry of the Noldor-Sindar to Nelyar-Tatyar - the Nelyar will stay together as one relatively homogenous tribe but go through a succession line of rulers - and have one small rogue group that attacks everyone (the pirates as the Fëanorian equivalent), whereas the Tatyar (in a process more violently than the Sindar-Falmari-Silvan) will splinter into multiple factions and some remain independent and others combine. Mornacu's group, I guess, roughly parallels the Falmari.