OH MY GOD.

That is so good and so cruel. Maedhros watching Fingon die from the brow of the hill as he retreats...

Inkpot Gods is my fave. It was like my top song on Spotify the year it came out, I have a print of the album lyrics on my wall- I'm literally staring at it right now. I adore The Amazing Devil so much!!

Inkpot Gods could be true for so many silm characters- I've always seen it as a Beren and Lúthien song, but yessss it fits Maeglin and Aredhel so good as well! It literally contains the line I will be the man my father never was

MY BOY MAEGLIN WAS SO YOUNG AND NEVER STOOD A GODDAMN CHANCE

Ooh! Oh! Very interesting!

Curufin deals with his bad days like a lot of other people with chronic illnesses or injuries- it varies a lot from day to day. Over the years he's learned to accept the bad days as they come, and has crucially learned that they do go away again and he'll feel better, but at the start, especially when the bad days outnumbered the good, he struggled a lot with feeling inadequate. There was this middle portion of his recovery that was probably the worst for him, where he was recovered enough to feel like he could be doing a lot of things normally and without help, but wasn't able to accurately judge his energy levels/spoons/however you want to phrase it, and was very uneasy and bitter about still needing help when he did over-exert himself. Haerel was a saint throughout all of that, and was the main person who helped him find a way to learn to live with his new body as best as he can.

Where we're at now in the thread verse, Curufin has mostly worked out his limits and accepted them for what they are, and is for the most part content. When he has bad days, he knows they're just that- days- and more importantly he has such a strong network around him to help out. His family, yes, but after Curufin overworks himself a few times a more robust system is put in place around him.

The other engineers and smiths that Curufin works with day to day know to look out for the signs of exhaustion or a flare-up in him, and they'll tell the duty healers who are always stationed within Barad Eithel and basically sitting around and waiting for something to go wrong. The warning will then get passed up through the healers until it reaches the desk of someone who regularly treats Curufin- not always Haerel, they're insanely busy, but one of their senior healers at least.

At this point, Curufin will usually go to them himself if he knows he's pushed himself too hard or can feel something flaring up, because he's not an idiot. The healers won't normally go out of their way to check on him because for Curufin it feels like an invasion of his privacy- which Haerel argues is a great reason to go to the healers himself and not wait for things to get so bad that someone else has to intervene- but they will keep a closer eye for another couple of days.

If Curufin wakes up to a bad day, the first person who will know is one of the servants who comes in to light fires and bring in hot water, etc. After a few false starts, Curufin's servants get training by Haerel in what a bad day might look like, what to bring him that might help, and when to fetch the healers versus when to just let him sleep. It's taken a lot of time and effort to build up this system and network around Curufin, but it's of course worth it.

Ooh yes that is very Aredhel and Maeglin! The song is here for anyone who wants an easily-clickable link.

If you want another sad Maeglin song, listen to Loneliest by Måneskin and imagine it as a conversation between Maeglin and Aredhel as she's lying there slowly dying in Gondolin from Ëol's poisoned spear. I'm nice like that.

📚 Who's your favorite author (or a few of them)?

Ooh, there's a few! I have a deep, deep and abiding love for Terry Pratchett and the Discworld series, because they are so British and so wonderfully written and funny but heartfelt and make me think about things differently. I started off with Nightwatch and now I own so many of his books. Neil Gaiman falls into that category as well- he's a little darker and more ruthless, but he also writes so well.

For High Fantasy- obviously Tolkien, that's a given, but also Guy Gavriel Kay is a fantastic author and not well known enough. He helped Christopher Tolkien build up the Silmarillion so he understands worldbuilding down to its bones, he went to the school of Tolkien and he learnt everything he could, and then he has used it to write the most amazing historical fantasy novels that are so well-researched they just leap straight off the page. Start with A Song for Arbonne if you've never read him before, it's a story set in a fantasy medieval Provence and explores the power of the bard and the troubadour, and the influence of art on society, and it's wonderful.

I also love Sarah J Maas and her fantasy series- I was a teenage girl reading those and seeing for perhaps the first time for myself a fantasy world where women were complex and angry and hurt and grieving and jealous and bitchy and soft and gentle and caring and tough and breakable and everything in between, and where periods were talked about and first impressions weren't everything, and where women weren't on their own but gathered around each other and helped each other back up.

🙋🏽‍♂️ Who's your favorite oc?

ANON YOU'RE ASKING ME TO PICK MY FAVOURITE CHILD, HOW COULD YOU?

I love them all equally but ooooof right now because of where we are at in the thread verse, it's got to be Gwedhron.

Gwedhron, because he is a feral bastard who is only constrained by his loyalty to Maedhros, and I love the type of character who is defined by their dogged loyalty, who will kill and die and do terrible things for someone else because it fills some sort of hole in their chest and makes their life worthwhile. He's definitely not helping right now in Hope Dangles on a String by enabling Maedhros' plans against Doriath, but he thinks he's helping. Not only does he think that, he knows it- this is his job, to lay out options for Maedhros and then trust Maedhros to pick the right one, to do the right thing by Gwedhron and his people, to do right by them. And I'll let you in on a bit of a sneak peek- when things do turn out okay and not in an invasion of Doriath- Gwedhron doesn't feel guilty. He really honestly doesn't. He did his job, and he did it well, and yeah sure he would have liked to fight some Doriathrim to make a point, but Maedhros says otherwise and so he doesn't. He doesn't feel bad at all about helping him make these plans- he's doing his job and he did it well!

He's such a feral idiot, and I love him.

She's not someone I've given a huge amount of thought to because of the fact that the series starts after her death, but I do have thoughts on her! Mostly in how she relates to Maeglin, because he's my boy, but also Celegorm and Curufin, and Fingon as well.

Aredhel in Aman is best characterised, I think, as carefree. She's the younger of her siblings, she rides out in all white- a bold thing to do for a hunter given how obvious it makes you, a bold statement saying 'look how good I am, look how well I can do this, look at me'. I think she enjoys life a lot and loves her siblings and her wider family, but is happy to do so from afar at times.

The ice does a lot of things to everyone, but I think for Aredhel it makes her hard. She's the hunter in the remaining family, she is suddenly being relied on in a way she wasn't before, and it's constantly a knife edge of trying to learn how to hunt seal and fend off bears and do anything she can to help the people around her. I think that hardens her a lot, it makes her dig deep and grit her teeth and lean into anger because that's how you keep moving. Out of all her siblings, she's the most wary of Maedhros when Fingon brings him back- not because she doesn't love him, but because she understands better than the others the desperation of a wounded animal and how quickly it might turn.

This might actually be what just begins to bridge the gap between her and Celegorm- because there is a massive gap, after Losgar, where both Celegorm and Aredhel are leaning into their anger to keep going, and especially for Celegorm there's nobody around to rein him in. But when Fingon brings Maedhros back and they're all in that horrible suspense of waiting to see what happens, I think Celegorm and Aredhel are the only two who quietly consider what might happen if Maedhros turns out to be corrupted beyond saving, and they are definitely the only two who have some semblance of a plan for how to deal with that. That's a horrible thing to have to consider, but there is a solidarity between them in that it's theirs.

Curufin mostly gets dragged back into the fold of Aredhel-Celegorm-Curufin by Celegorm, because he's tired of his brother's bitching. There's a lot of yelling when they finally do all get together, but it does help to clear the air.

In the peace years, Aredhel genuinely does love being with Celegorm and Curufin, because their personalities just gel together in a satisfying way. Aredhel is brash and Celegorm is loud and Curufin is quiet but cutting but not to her or Celegorm, which for Aredhel makes it more than okay. I think they have quite an easy relationship, the three of them- not that it's surface level, but they don't tend to have big complicated conversations like say Maglor and Maedhros might, or Fingon and Turgon. They just like hanging out with each other. Aredhel does love her brothers, and she has a lot of respect and a small amount of guilt for the way Fingon is the Crown Prince and is stuck in Barad Eithel so she doesn't have to be, but she will also take the win.

Gondolin grates on Aredhel in a way she's never felt before, which probably makes it all the worse. She's never been restrained like that before- she's never been told flat out no like that before, and it stings all the more because it's Turgon, fussy pedantic Turgon, who is insisting on it. She's not rebellious, per se, but she does feel stifled and caged.

Which of course, makes it all the worse when she runs from Gondolin and ends up with Ëol.

The thing about abusive relationships that's often so insidious is that they don't tend to start like that, and once Aredhel finally realises the predicament she's in, it's too late for her to get out easily. She doesn't expect to love Maeglin, she'd never really considered marriage and children, but she loves him so much. And I think she begins to realise what situation they are truly in when Maeglin grows old enough to attract Ëol's attention, and Aredhel's first thought is no, don't see him.

She's not lost that hardness, she's not lost that cutting edge that was honed by the Ice and watching Curufin twist his words and Celegorm be brash and loud until everyone is only looking at him. I don't think she really plans an escape, in the sense of sitting down and deciding how to get out, but I think for a long time it's in the back of her head, and when the opportunity arises, she takes it and she takes Maeglin, and she runs, damning the consequences because she her son is hers, and he has to know better than this.

We're not quite at Maeglin's pov yet, we've got a little ways to go before him and Celebrimbor become important! And oh boy are they going to become important- this story is going to take a hard 90 degree turn about halfway through and then we're going to go off in a direction that perhaps might surprise a few of you, especially when it comes to who precisely is going to be shouldering a lot of the narrative weight and why. We will get into Maeglin's pov then, and you're going to find out that although he is doing so much better than he first was after the Galad Lain, there's still some stuff lingering in the shadows for him which will unexpectedly rear its head when he finds himself in a stressful situation.

I am so excited to get to that part of the story! And also get to the bits we have to get to in order to get there, because oh boy, shit's gonna go down.

Ooh interesting.

I think in canon, Doriath and Menegroth remain in such a stasis for so long that Thingol doesn't have many chances to become disliked, if that makes sense? The Girdle keeps them all safe and Doriath keeps ticking along whilst the Noldor burn and die outside their borders, and that's enough for most people to be at least ambivalent towards Thingol, and probably think he's doing a decent enough job. There'll always be a range of opinions, there'll always be people who disagree with most things he does and there'll always be sycophants, but in general, pretty much up until he dies, Thingol is doing alright in terms of a popularity contest.

In canon? Some people are still holding onto that- Doriath is safe, they've been kept safe from wacky Noldor shenanigans and dragons and orcs, and they're pretty prosperous. Especially those who don't have much interaction with people outside of Doriath, they don't have any reason to see the wider picture, and so are content with the status quo and thus Thingol as a King.

Post Galad Lain, the more that someone is exposed to wider Beleriand, in general, the more uneasy they become with Doriath's isolationism. It starts with Beleg and Mablung and the first few marchwardens who visit Barad Eithel, who go alongside patrols into Angband, and then expands to the healers who go to collect the rescued Doriathrim captives being treated in Barad Eithel and the marchwardens who accompany them, and then further still to the people involved in writing trade agreements at Melian's behest, and the ones who meet the grain caravans and the Noldorin merchants on the border, and so on and so on. And that unease spreads- some people it takes a tighter hold of than others, but it does spread.

Once again, there will always be a range of opinions. Some people cannot be convinced that the Noldor are worth trusting or opening up to- it is hard to change someone's mind when their decision is based on emotion rather than logic. For some people, the literal centuries of stability override the last couple decades of wacky shenanigans. For some, Alqualondë means the slate can't ever be wiped clean. Some people just genuinely like Thingol- for a long time, he's been a good King to them. So he does have people who admire him, and like him, and will follow him. Far fewer than in canon, but they're still definitely there.

First off, yes that song suits just-about-to-have-a-breakdown Maeglin so much and that's so sad! The bit right at the end of 'I'm miserable and nobody even notices' oooof that's what Maeglin thinks 100% (he's wrong, Fingon has noticed and Maedhros has noticed and they're there for him, but he's been so alone for so long it doesn't even occur to him that they would have noticed, and part of him is hoping that they haven't because then that means he's not Useful and Fully Functioning and then why would they love him?)

Anyway. Maeglin is doing so well now, he's living the good life as Crown Prince and is very loved, and we will be seeing him soon enough! I also promise that nothing bad will happen to Ereinion in this story, he's far too precious for that and I love him too much.

With the tension between Fingon and Maedhros I wanted to be so so careful about how I wrote it because it was so damn important to me that there is never any doubt at all to the reader that they're still head over heels in love with each other. They're arguing because they're coming at this very difficult situation from different perspectives and with different traumas and histories, but they both do want the same thing- they just don't agree on how to get it. And that's why I put in that bit about the Dagor Bragollach, and how both Fingon and Maedhros are waiting with dread for the other shoe to drop, because you're so right- it's the exact same tension of knowing something is coming but not knowing what, but their solutions for dealing with it are different.

I'm so excited to get to writing Maglor and the twins- I've been sidetracked by the pacific rim AU but I will get back to it- because Maglor has been somewhat sedately following Maedhros for a good long while now, including in this story, and he's been the ultimate supporting character, like you said, which means it's going to be a really interesting challenge to make him the main character of a story and what he has to do within the narrative to take that place.

As for the ratcheting tension, it's uhhhhh not going to get better. This is the first sentence of the next chapter: