F.A. 67
(Trigger warning: This story contains a parental argument and childhood trauma.)
She had loved to play with her father. Dineloth was very small then, chasing her father around her family’s small house on the outskirts of Doriath, not far from where the line of enchantment woven by Queen Melian began, where the trees of the forests of Region and Neldoreth were not so dense but an ever present connection to the land itself.
Smiling came easy to Satarion, dodging behind wooden furniture and prancing just out of his young daughter’s reach. She trailed behind him, giggling enthusiastically as she kept attempting to pounce on him and hold him fast. And, like many fathers, he eventually had to give in, allowing the child to land on top of him, falling to the floor with a soft, “Oof!” and laughing in turn when she poked him in the nose with a tiny finger, signaling that he was caught.
“I yield, seldenya! I yield! But you have forgotten the most important part!”
“Wahh... What part?”
Her father sat up slightly and grinned, reaching out to tickle her in the sides!
“Never show mercy to your prey!”
The sound of her delighted shrieks and laughter rang through the air as she tried to get him back but ultimately dissolved into a pile of squirming giggles on the floor beside him. Eventually, Satarion picked himself up off the floor and stood to his full height, carrying his daughter with him. His dark hair, matched by her own save that hers was thicker and messier by far, was in a state of disarray. But it seemed to matter very little to either of them; for, light and love shone through both steel grey and spring green eyes, reflecting back their prefect happiness.
“When your mother returns home, would you like for me to catch some fireflies for you?”
Had the child been on the ground she would have hopped up and down with excitement. Instead she clapped her hands together... and then paused to really think about it.
“Will you let the fireflies go before the sun comes back?”
Her father chuckled in amusement! “Aiya! Such care you have for the smallest inhabitants of the world! Yes, Nautiel,” He relented, calling her by the name he gave her and chucking her under the chin gently. “I will be sure to let them go before first light. But I know you like to watch them while you take your rest at night, hmm?”
Before Dineloth could reply in earnest, the door to their house flew open and in stepped her mother.
“P-Put her down! Don’t touch her!”
-
Satarion turned, features scrunched up in confusion. But when he saw the frightened, manic look upon his wife’s face the first stirrings of fear began to make his heart beat faster within his chest. He held his daughter a little tighter, looking very much like a animal caught in a trap. Yet still, he reached out for his beloved with one hand.
“Melethril, what is wrong?”
Gladil did not take it; in fact, she recoiled from him slightly, as if he had meant to harm her. And yet, it seemed that even that reaction pained her all the more. The look in her green eyes spoke of a broken, bleeding heart that even now she was trying to shield from him.
“Put her down!” She insisted, voice becoming high pitched and shaky. “Now! And don’t harm her! She is only a child!”
Slowly, carefully, he set Dineloth down, looking more and more crestfallen with each passing moment. The child, not understanding what was passing between her parents, ran up to her mother and hugged her about her legs. Gladil frantically scooped her up and pulled her close, inspecting her for possible injuries and yet not looking relieved when she found that there were none.
“Why… would you ask me that? Why would I hurt our precious daughter, Melethril? I would never—”
“Is that what you all told Aran Thingol when you came here? Is it?! It’s true isn’t it? Murderer!”
Her words hit him like blows to the gut; like a fast acting poison, threatening to undo him from the inside out. Satarion could feel all the walls he had constructed about himself, shutting away the horrors of his nefarious past, begin to crumble into dust with each accusation and he found himself unable to hold the seams of the best parts of himself together. He could only watch with undisguised anguish as his daughter’s eyes, so uncannily similar to his wife’s began to exhibit the same fear as she looked back at him. She may not have been old enough to understand in full what was happening but she did understand right from wrong. She understood what it was to kill.
He took a slow step forward, reaching out with both hands, palms up, not wanting to give in yet. He had never wanted them to know what past had haunted his every step. Withholding the truth as others had done was his first mistake; he understood that now. Some part of him had always understood this. But he could fix this. He could rectify his wrongs if he was only given a chance.
“Please… You cannot understand how sorry I am. Do not do this to me, Gladil, please!... Let me—”
“NO! Do not touch us!” Gladil dodged his advance, running around him – from him – cradling her daughter, who was shaking like a leaf, deathly tight to her chest. Her long fingers grasped about the weathered, wooden table behind her until she had a sharpened foraging knife within her hand. She held it out in front of herself like a weapon, prepared to fend him off should he come at them again. And he would, in her mind, perhaps try to do to them what she had heard he and his kin had done to the Teleri of Alqualondë in lands far away from here.
“I wouldn’t—”
“LIAR! MONSTER! You killed them! You and your monstrous kin have blood on your hands! And you… dare to come here and—” Gladil choked as hot tears of both anguished love and desperate hate streamed down her face like twin rivers. “You lied to me. Everything was a complete lie.”
“No!” cried Satarion, seeming to recoil from the pain of it all. “I love you and that is no lie! I love you and our child more than anything—”
“DON’T!” shouted Gladil, even as her daughter put her small hands over her own ears. “Do not stand there and lie to me! What have you done?... What have you done?!”
A wail rose up in the air as Dineloth clung to her mother, desperate to make sense of what was happening between the two people she loved more than anything in this world. Her father, a monster? How could she reconcile the image of a blood-stained murderer with the father she had always loved and adored? And yet, she she turned to look at him, even she could see how his usually benign and loving expression as twisted and warped into something fearsome. And the strange fire she could see in the depths of his steel colored gaze… it frightened her.
Her mother whisked her away to the other room looking around frantically for a place to hide her. Eventually she chose a small space beneath the stairs to loft up above. She hurriedly set her daughter down and half-coaxed half-shoved her into the small crawl space amongst the sacks of rough grain and foraged vegetables, even as the child continued to cry.
“Shhh… Shh shh shh!... Stay here, Dineloth, do not come out until I tell you, please. For me, henig! Not a word! Shhhhhh! Be quiet and hide. Do not come out. It is not safe.”
But, already, Satarion was on his wife’s heels, only stopped when she turned, foraging knife brandished and an arm flung out to block him. He stared at her in abject disbelief, taking a step back… and then another… and another.
“Do all the years we have shared together mean nothing to you now?”
His attempts to cling to the only things in this world that brought him joy only served to deepen the gaping, raw wound that he himself had created with his years of silence on the subject of his past. It was the final blow that broke the dam.
-
Dineloth, huddled beneath the stairs in the dark, held her knees into her chest as sobbed into them. The shouting and screaming from both her parents echoed from the other room and it made her want to disappear entirely. There was so much she did not understand… and yet there was far more that she did.
“What were you planning on doing to us?! Were you going to lead them here and have them slaughter us both?!”
“I would never! You know me!”
“Did I ever know you at all?!”
-
Her father was going to kill them? Why would he do something so evil? Did he not love her anymore?
-
“I wish you had never come here! I wish I never met you!”
“Gladil, do not do this. If you need time, I will give it to you. But please—”
“You will get out of this house! Go back to your kinsman and never come back!”
-
He was leaving? If he left, would this all stop?
-
“But our daughter—”
“You will never see her again, you monster! Your blood may run in her veins but she is my child and she will never turn out to be a monster like you are!”
-
Her father was a monster… And she could end up just like him. She was… wrong. Something was wrong with her. Maybe she should have never been in the first place. None of this should have happened.
-
“GET OUT!”
“Gladil…”
“LEAVE! GET OUT! NEVER COME BACK!”
Dineloth bit her lip to stop herself from sobbing, curled in on herself, and held her hands tightly over her ears as the shouting got louder. The anger and pain from both of her parents were like daggers to her heart and she felt as if she could scream as well.
But no, her mother said she had to hide and be quiet. It was not safe. She couldn’t be a monster like her father. No, she would be quiet… So very very, quiet. No one would see her and she would see no one. She could pretend little by little that she was not here at all; that she could go somewhere else where there was nothing and not exist.
…
How much time had gone by? Minutes? Hours? She couldn’t tell but she nearly jumped out of her skin when she felt a gentle, familiar hand on her shoulder.
“Shh, it’s alright, henig… Don’t cry.”
Twin pairs of green eyes met as Gladil pulled her daughter out from the alcove under the stairs and held her to her chest. Dineloth could feel her mother’s tears wet her dark hair and she clung to her. She pulled back only once to peer into the other room apprehensively.
“He can’t hurt you. I have sent him away, see?”
She was correct. Satarion was gone from the house.
Her mother wiped away a few of her own tears, released her, and stood, moving into the other room. Dineloth did not follow, rooted to the spot and shaking, as if afraid one wrong move would undo what she felt was a tenuous peace.
“Come out, he is gone now.” Her mother’s voice did very little to reassure her but she obeyed, taking some steps forward and reaching out to hold her mother’s waiting hand. All about them the house was still and quiet. Night was in full swing as the moonlight, filtered by the leaves and branches of trees, scarcely illuminated the world outside the windows. Her mother led her over to a table and swiftly lit a single rushlight. “We are going somewhere safer.”
The child watched in silence as her mother darted about the room, grabbing this and that and packing a simple woven bag, pausing every so often when the pain felt within became almost too much and her willowy form seemed to drop and fresh tears cascaded down her cheeks. Dineloth looked about the small, rustic cottage that had been her only home for all her short life thus far and felt like a stranger within it. Her mother’s intentions were clear; they would leave this place behind forever, never to return. This house was no longer her home anymore.
But what if he came looking for them even if they were gone from here?
Dineloth startled slightly again when her mother took her small hand once more, squeezing it gently. There was what Gladil had hoped was a reassuring smile upon her lips. To her daughter, it looked unspeakably sad and frightened still.
“Shh,” her mother soothed as she led her to the door. “You don’t need to say anything. Naneth will keep you safe.”
