#a: rinthecap

[archamion]

Princess Elia Martell arriving at Dragonstone 🤍

My commission by the wonderful and talented @rinthecap thank you!!

[xshieraseastarx]

Once again Daenerys dreams of recusing Rhaegar at the trident. Alas, it is too late 💔

“I wish I could have known him”

“I wish he could have known you”✨

🎨 My commission done by the lovely @rinthecap

[dalliansss]

My commission from the very talented @rinthecap 🥰🥰🥰

“My Sassy Elf” 😂😂😂

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a good blorbo must be in want of art of that blorbo. And on this front, I have suffered because there is really no Háma art out there despite the fact that he’s rad. (I won’t bore you all again with all of the reasons why he’s the best, but you can find that here.) So I asked @rinthecap to draw me a lovely and handsome Háma, and they delivered in the best possible way!!! Here’s my guy, with a lot on his mind as he watches his king slowly lose his grip on reality, but always at the ready to jump into the fray and help.

I love ALL of Rincap’s art, which you should definitely all go check out if you haven’t, and am extremely grateful for this beautiful and necessary contribution to a world that was severely lacking in Háma representation! ♥️♥️♥️ His face, his armor, his hair, it’s all aces!

And here, for good measure, is my Háma headcanon:

His father was the royal armorer in Edoras, and his mother worked alongside him; he did the metal work, and she handled leather. Little Háma grew up around their workshop, playing quietly in the back or listening to his mother tell stories while she stitched together vambraces or gloves. As he got older, he helped his parents with simple tasks, like linking rings for chainmail. When a mailcoat he worked on saved Théoden from a Dunlendish arrow and the king himself came by to thank young Háma, he nearly burst with pride. He knew right then that he wanted to dedicate his life to protecting the king and made it his goal to be captain of his guard someday.

Háma’s father was severely injured in a workshop accident not long after, and everyone marveled at how quickly he apparently recovered and was able to keep turning out work. What they didn’t know is that Háma’s mother took over most of the business, having learned metal crafting over the many years of work alongside her husband. They didn’t tell anyone who was actually making the pieces because they weren’t sure anyone would wear armor made entirely by a woman, but Háma knew, of course, and it filled him with both pride and frustration to hear people heap praise on his mother’s work while attributing it all to his father.

While he was working his way up through the ranks of the guards, Háma met and fell in love with Bryttalif, a midwife in Edoras. Brytta was herself pregnant and unmarried when they met, so she was viewed as a little scandalous. But they hit it off right away and he really didn’t care about town gossip or what other people had to say because she was just the sort of kind and gentle-hearted person that he was. The scandal was eventually forgotten because Háma and Brytta got married, which gave the whole situation a sheen of acceptability. He adopted her daughter Halwinë as his own and was absolutely crazy about her–Middle Earth’s truest Girl Dad. Brytta was pregnant with their second child when Háma was killed at Helm’s Deep. It was a boy she named Wilspell (“welcome news”).

Háma’s sword was recovered from outside the gate of the Hornburg after his death and was thereafter always used by the captain of the king’s guard, being transferred from person to person as part of a little ceremony whenever a new captain was appointed.

He was buried in armor his mother made.

[sweetnekofemme]

"this could be us but you hate me."

"if i do that to you, i'm going to fuck you."

PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASP-

(art is not mine! creds to original artist!!! ^.^) (caitvi artist - @rinthecap )

- men dni, this is about nasty hot lesbian sex.

[dwellordream]

a VERY generous individual bought me a commission from the VERY talented @rinthecap, so here is Frances Knight, one of the protagonist of my original superhero story, Giantslayer (which is complete and only 52k words on ao3!). Frances is the daughter of an incarcerated supervillain who is eager to get revenge on the vigilante who put her father in prison. She is also a huge fan of detective novels.

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

@dfwbwfbbwfbwf @eri-pl @papita474 @tolkienreader1996 @stellavesperis @thedarksearises @flowering-smile @eglerieth @rinthecap @alilsakurablossom @thecoolblackwaves @camille-lachenille @sadsilmarilsoup @tar-thelien @braxix @velvet4510 @eight-pointed-star @melestasflight @rebeccas-rambles @thewhitewolf2002 I appreciate you.

[winwin17]

ICE CREAM DELIVERY. !!!!!!🍦♡ྀི give ice cream to your favourite bloggers and help them stay cool this summer. 🍧♡

Love this, and thx for the ice cream delivery!

I'll return the favor by tagging a few blogs I enjoy as well!

@fintan-pyren @autistook @thatsbelievable @rinthecap @tolkien-fantasy

🍨🍧🍦

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Happy recent birthday @cilil !!

I can’t say this is my favorite shade, but I do like green, so I’ll take it. And picking my favorite character is an agonizing decision, but I’ll go with the one who strikes the best balance between my passion for obscure dudes and someone that people might actually recognize — Háma! (As drawn by @rinthecap ♥️)

Feel free to join in @emmanuellececchi @hippodameia @dilettantefeminist @eomerofrohan or anyone else who is so moved!

Tag game!! . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ ✨

Birthday colour vs favourite character.

Link to birthday colour

Tagging: @white-flower-blooming // @shaxxophone // @queerferalgremlinnooneaskedfor // @31duskballs // @weepingpussywillowtree // @subtlybrilliant // @jadedzer0// @icarus-suraki // @oneiro-nautical // @fismoll7secinv // @princessofxianle // @quilleth //

૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა if you are not tagged but want to join, please feel free to reblog this post with your results and favourite character, I'd love to see it!!

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

I’m still queuing to cover my overseas trip, and nothing says “oh, look, it’s like she never left” than a post where I force reminders of my obscurest Rohirrim blorbos (Rohirrblos? Blorbirrim? I’m workshopping it) on strangers.

The undisputed king of my “who?” guys is Guthláf, the (canonical!) banner bearer of Théoden.

A few of you read his love story with fellow Rohirrblo Wídfara in Where Now the Horse and the Rider, but you may not remember this lovely drawing of them that was also made by @rinthecap ! And if I’m looking back at favorite fan art, I am absolutely going to include the one of two of my dearest obscure guys looking so incredibly sweet together!

Call me biased, but they’re lovely and wonderful and special and I can’t get enough of them!

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

I’m on international travel for, like, 13 days with questionable ability to check in here. So I’ve queued a few things, esp. some fan art faves. And it only feels right to start off by re-sharing one that was made just for me of Middle Earth’s bestest human, Háma of Rohan!

@rinthecap drew this for me a while ago to help rectify the egregious lack of Háma art that’s out there, but I feel like it’s always a good time to remind ourselves of just how awesome he is—and how awesome this art is! I mean, look at him! 😍

(If you need reasons WHY he’s just the best, you can find that here and my personal HC for him is here.)

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

🪓 Hewn and Sewn 🪡

I’ve been thinking a lot about Háma’s death again lately and started this fic for Tolkien Horror Week. And then I both failed miserably on the timetable for that and realized that what I needed for myself was to find a way for his horrifying end (it’s there in the books, and it’s not pretty) to not be totally devoid of consolation. And so it maybe wasn’t right for a Horror Week event anyway. Your mileage may vary on whether you find anything remotely consoling in it. I just love my guy, my #1, and want him to be happy. I don’t know if this accomplishes what I want, but I tried.

CW: canonical character death. He met a brutal end, per Tolkien, and that’s here, along with a fair amount of battle/war reality, incl. some blood and guts and general violence/death.

Art by @ rinthecap

**********

A body is surprisingly hard to kill. 

The first thrust of a spear may bring a man to his knees, the second fills his mouth with blood, the third can barely be extracted again from the depths of his chest, but only the fourth brings mercy at last. Until then, the body clings to its life like a sailor adrift in an ocean storm, scrabbling after any tiny scrap of floating debris and clutching with bloodied nails and broken fingers to the last vestiges of a smashed and splintered ship that somehow hasn’t yet totally disappeared beneath the roiling waves. The body finds its greatest strength at the moment of its greatest vulnerability, stubbornly refusing to relinquish its desperate hold on survival and rallying to endure unimaginable suffering for just a little longer — one more boot to the skull, one more arrow through the gut, one more blade in the back, one more, and one more, and one more — to see whether the body’s will to live can outlast the enemy’s will to kill. 

Háma knows all of this now.

He knows that the great tales of history have left out much of the truth, that the epic songs of invincible riders who slice through enemies like a scythe through wheat are more fantasy than fact. They have left out the hard work of dealing death, the sweaty, gruesome, arduous labor of cleaving into skin and muscle, hacking through sinew and bone, splitting open hearts and stomachs and lungs. They have left out the vomit and the blood and the entrails, the slippery gore that loosens grips and unsteadies footings, sending blows wide of their marks and into places that deliver pain rather than ending it. They have left out the soul-deadening horror of looking another man in the eye and realizing the only way to end his misery is to first give him more.  

These realities are seldom spoken of, threatening as they are to the necessary project of war. New soldiers each discover them on their own, and Háma was no different. He came to the army while still hardly more than a boy, an idealist raised on stories of grand, heroic campaigns and aspiring to the honor of being one of the king’s own guards. None but his mother had tried to warn him of the cruelties he was sure to encounter, for she knew well the gentle heart that beat in her son’s chest. Always the first to smile, to extend a hand of welcome, to offer quiet encouragement, to assume the best even of those who had done him harm, she knew how such a heart would rebel against those inevitable cruelties. But he had so little experience of all that was vicious and foul in the world that he couldn’t truly comprehend the warning, no matter how carefully he listened, and in the end her bleak, abstract prudence was no match for the vivid potency of his dreams. He kissed her farewell and went off in trusting pursuit of all that was noble and righteous, blissfully innocent of the ugly truth behind the fantasy.

It took only one battle for him to realize that the valiant and glorious contests of poetry were neither valiant nor glorious but rather panicked, messy slogs where nothing was simple, nothing was clear and nothing was as he expected it to be. The shock of it nearly got him killed, frozen fast in horror amidst a raging squall of bristling spears and glinting blades and hearing nothing but the echo of his mother’s words, suddenly so palpable and so obvious. Only the panic and the mess and the general disorder saved him from meeting his fate before he was able to rouse himself at last to the grim necessity of action and do what was expected of him. He waded into the carnage, he added to it, he turned aside from suffering that he couldn’t relieve, he tried not to look at suffering that he had caused. And somehow, by the grace of Béma, he survived to see the victory, though the word itself now caught in his throat, devoid of meaning.

He cried after that battle, hiding alone in a darkened corner of a stable and wracked by huge, shaking sobs that both embarrassed and reassured him, proof that the day’s bloody brutality had exposed his naive ignorance but not taken his humanity. He wondered whether that humanity could endure even one more such pitiless trial or if it would break him, changing the very core of who he was. He wondered if he was already broken in ways that he couldn’t yet understand, ways that would be revealed to him only later in the long dark of a sleepless night or the cold grip of a relived memory. He wept for the man he had been and for the man he had wanted to be, someone who might now be a stranger to him forever. 

He may have quit that very day had an older soldier not stumbled upon him and his tears, pulling him to his feet and tossing him a scrap of cloth to dry his face. We have all felt what you’re feeling, the soldier said. Anyone who is untroubled by taking lives should never be trusted with a sword. The soldier walked him over to a nearby field where neat rows of villagers were laid out to await burial — old men holding canes, young mothers in bright dresses, a few girls and boys with skinned knees or milk stains on their upper lips — all caught unaware by the enemy before the forces of Rohan had arrived to drive them back. Remember that you have killed so that people like this might live, the soldier said, and he left Háma to keep watch among the corpses, to contemplate death anew.

It seemed a simple reminder, a basic truth so obvious that it need not be spoken, and yet he had needed to hear it all the same. To be a guardian, using his strength and abilities to protect others, had been his earliest aspiration, and now perhaps that dream could protect his own heart as well, offering him the sense of purpose that would help to make the suffering feel worthwhile. He walked slowly from the silent field and back into the center of the village, where water was being drawn, animals fed, children minded, lives lived despite the tragedy to befall them. He rejoined his éored with a brief nod to the older soldier, and when they rode out again, he did so with the rent in his heart not healed but at least knit loosely together again, mended with stitches of duty and honor.

*****

Since that day he has killed many times, never unprovoked or with wanton disregard and never with the overpowering horror of that first battle, but also never with the clean, simple ease that he had once been led to expect. Each time he is forced to inflict pain on another, he feels it in his own limbs, and though he hates no man, he comes closest in his despair over those who fight him the hardest, who persist through blow after weary blow and refuse to yield or retreat. Do not force me to do this to you, his mind pleads silently, and sometimes, though it means the same thing, do not force me to do this to myself. In direst conditions, compelled to keep defending himself from an opponent with the white glimmer of bone shining out from mangled red flesh or with a dark, empty space where an eye had just been, he cannot keep these thoughts contained to his own head. Barely audible amidst the clash of metal and the thunder of hoofbeats and the groaning of the injured and maimed, he speaks the words aloud. I am sorry.

Many of these men linger in his memories, images of them emerging suddenly and unbidden from the depths of his mind while in the middle of doing other, more benign things. The man who stared up at him from a puddle of gore, tears streaming from eyes that were the same pale green as those of Háma’s youngest sister. The grievously wounded man who had spit in Háma’s face when offered mercy before plunging a knife into his own throat. The man who whimpered one word over and over as they grappled for control, a word Háma later learned meant ‘please’ in the tongue of the Easterlings. These memories tear at the stitches in his heart, testing their strength and threatening to sunder him anew.

One man in particular haunts his thoughts, lurking always in the shadows of his waking mind or the hazy, fragmented mirages of his dreams. Part of a company of Dunlendings who crossed the Adorn without leave, this man was a talented warrior, and had he only been taller or slightly larger of frame things might have ended differently. As it was, it took three heavy strokes of Háma’s sword to bring him down, and the battle-notched edge of Háma’s blade caught on something as he sought to pull back the final stroke. Forced to lean in close, to brace his foot by the dying man’s chest as he struggled to free his weapon from whatever barbed hook of metal or bone had trapped it, he found something he did not expect on the haggard, shivering face that was now only inches from his own — a smile, small but clear, and growing only wider as the man pulled in his last rasping breaths and the light slowly dimmed from his eyes.

The memory of that smile never truly leaves Háma. It follows him everywhere, as attached to his mind as his shadow is to his feet. He sees it when he stands long, lonely hours on watch in the cold and when he sits in a crowded tavern that swelters with the heat of a hundred bodies pressed side by side. It creeps up on him in the quiet wandering of his thoughts while his hands perform some common, repetitive task, or it appears with startling suddenness in the middle of pressing matters, insisting on claiming a share of his focus with the urgency of its unknowable mystery.

He dreams up a thousand different reasons why a man would smile through such agony, somehow finding happiness in the moment of ultimate despair. Perhaps the man hated his life and was glad to be rid of it at last, or he felt honor and pride in the idea of dying for his cause, though that cause was repugnant to Háma himself. Perhaps the smile was brought on by a delusion or hallucination, a vision of pleasure or comfort that shimmered with false loveliness for that Dunlending’s eyes alone. Perhaps it wasn’t even a smile but rather a spasm or tic, an arbitrary contortion of muscles masquerading as a familiar emotion and torturing Háma now with a futile search for meaning in the utterly meaningless. The only man to know the answer has taken it to his hastily dug grave. 

Háma lives these years balanced on the knife’s edge between revulsion and understanding, doubt and certainty, heart and gut. But with each battle, he learns better how to fight in a way that feels true to himself, anchored to his decency, and he learns better how to strengthen the parts of him that quail at the task, reinforcing those weak spots so that they prove all the harder to wound a second time. He patches himself with reminders of all that he fights for, and, in time, life gives him more and more to add to that armor. A beautiful wife who brings warmth and light into all of his days. A daughter who owns him, body and soul, from her first breath. Hard won respect and admiration, first from his commanders, then from the men entrusted to him, and finally from his king. He will never be a battle-hardened veteran, numb to the business of death, but he finds his way forward, refusing to let the sharp edges of those old memories and doubts carve and pare his spirit until it is shorn of all that is hopeful and joyous. Instead, he embraces the business of life, of being a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a friend, a King’s Guard, a captain, a doorward, all of his selves linked together like the rings of his mail and bringing him just as much strength. He is happy, and he is whole.

*****

And so it is that he finds himself strangely at peace on the ride to what will prove his last battle. He has spent a lifetime preparing himself for this moment, this challenge, and he will meet it with honor. The hand of fate has landed on Helm’s Deep, an unexpected turn but one that he welcomes. He knows this place, its gate, walls and keep, unbreached by any outsider in all the long years of history. A fortress and a refuge at once, it is everything that he holds himself to be: strength and shelter, protection and not aggression. If the Rohirrim are forced to this step, with the point of a sword at their backs, there is nowhere else he’d rather make their stand, defending the inviolable.

They have been warned that this fight will be unlike any other in the lifetimes of this army. This is no skirmish over the placement of a border, no periodic flare-up of ancient, simmering tensions. This is existential, a contest that will decide whether Rohan endures a little longer or falls entirely, and among their old enemies of Dunland there will be new enemies as well, orcs of Isengard that are taller, stronger, unafraid of the sun, more desirous of blood. They drink in the joy of death like a cat laps up cream, he is told. Show them no mercy, for none will be shown to you. He sees the logic of this advice even as he has no plans to follow it. He has worked too hard to keep the cruelty of the world from making him cruel in turn. He will do what must be done, but he will do it as himself, from goodness, and not in imitation of those he deems wicked.

Final commands are given. Théoden sends him to hold the gate, and though he feels ill at ease to leave the king, his one and only charge, he knows it is the greater need and he goes willingly. The ragtag assortment of defenders at the gate are his charge now — cavalry riders preparing to fight from foot, farmers of the Westfold, teenage boys whose beardless faces catch the moonlight — and he assures them that it is alright to be afraid. They will face the fear together. He feels some of that fear himself, more aware than ever of his captain’s uniform that will distinguish him among the masses, drawing attention in the one place where such attention is least welcome. But he would sooner die in this symbol of all he believes in and all he has worked for than to hide in common disguise. His uniform clothes him in courage.

The fighting itself, once it begins, passes quickly, as do most things that overwhelm. There is scarcely a second to take in what is happening before it’s happened, and things grow only more chaotic as the late night stretches into earliest morning. Fear keeps him moving, because to give in to the exhaustion, to stop for even half a second of stolen rest, is to expose yourself to the heavy stroke of an axe or a sword or a pike or any of the other tools Isengard has devised to sever the loose connections that hold a man’s body together. Fear keeps him on his feet, and courage keeps him pressing forward, unwilling to give ground toward that precious gate.

He fights this battle his way. He leaves those enemies who are injured beyond the point of threat to be collected by their countrymen. He dispatches mercy to those whose injuries have already guaranteed death, bringing an early end to their suffering. He takes no action from anger, only necessity. He kills, many times over, but always as a last resort and each time with a heavy heart, for even the orcs are living creatures, once descended from elves if old tales are true.

He is not unscathed in the struggle. Bloody weals, red and shining, cut across his cheek and throat, and his left arm hangs dead now at his side, the muscles needed to raise it severed by the point of a spear. But he is undaunted and rallies, again and again, as men and boys, soldiers and herders, guards and merchants, fathers and sons, fall all around him to the seemingly endless waves of new opponents. His luck holds, until suddenly it doesn’t.

The first sharp blow slides neatly into the narrow band of exposed leather near his shoulder, where a piece of his armor has been forcibly pried from his body. It slices cleanly through the layers of hide and cloth, cleanly between ribs, cleanly into the center of him. It stops him in his tracks, not from the pain, which is strangely delayed, but from the abrupt sensation that all the air has gone from his lungs, which leak uselessly now into the hollow of his chest. He is still standing, struggling to pull in delicate half breaths that each slice like a blade of their own, when the second blow lands, a sword at the knee that sends him to the ground. The third, a heavy, percussive jolt from a bludgeon, shivers the bones that don’t shatter outright and leaves him sunk helplessly in the muddy grass, surrounded by a pool of blood that started out as someone else’s but is soon more his than not.

A burst of flame to his left draws attention away as both sides rush toward the noise and light, and he is left for a moment on his own. Above him hangs the black, blank sky, the stars now blocked by clouds and haze and smoke. Beside him are an elderly man with no helmet and a split skull, eyes fixed open in unseeing horror, and a teenage boy, face gone grey and breathing shallow as the contents of his veins empty steadily from a gaping hole in his side. Háma would comfort him, take his hand and bid him a swift journey to the halls of his forebears, if he could only lift an arm or force a word from his lips. But there is no strength in that arm and no air to carry the sound. He manages only to inch his hand next to the fading warmth of the boy’s fingers, and he hopes the boy will feel it and know that he is there, that they are not alone. It isn’t enough, but it will have to be. 

A burning pressure builds in his chest, pushing out against his broken ribs and mangled muscles with a force that could tear apart whatever is left of him that is still intact, and somehow, above the screaming and the thunder and the clang of weaponry, he can hear a wet, bubbling sound each time he tries to inhale, as though he is drawing breath through a sopping cloth. He wonders if he might drown, miles from any river or lake or tide except his own blood that is rising in his lungs, and he uses his last gasp of energy to weakly raise his head, eyes searching desperately for a friendly face that might be able to drag him to help. But the eyes that meet his are instead cold and cutting, and they sparkle with sharp malice when they recognize the fine armor and burnished insignia of the captain of the King’s Guard. 

A voice calls in a tongue that Háma cannot understand, but he needs no translator to know its meaning or that of the answering calls. Fingers are pointed in his direction. Grips are tightened around axes and knives and clubs. Lips curl into wicked smirks as many feet advance toward him, the defenseless prey whose brutal end will send a message to no less than the king of Rohan himself. No mercy will be shown to you.

The crushing realization hits him in an instant, though perhaps he should have known it all along. This is the end. There aren’t enough allies left standing to save him, even if his wounds could be healed. The gate, the one object of his focus, is being torn now from its hinges, riven with deep fractures and fissures, and these men and orcs will pour through the gaping rupture just as soon as they are done with him. It will matter to none of them that he is as good as gone already, slowly choking to death on his own bile and blood, because they mean not just to kill but to destroy. They mean not to leave him in one piece, not to keep him recognizable even to those who love him best. They will take his life, but they will also take his identity, his dignity, his grace, his chance to be mourned over by those who would hold him, stroke his hair, kiss his brow, touch his cheek. 

He turns his head again to the young man at his side, to see one last Rohirrim face, but it has gone stony and lifeless, an unmoving mask of arrested youth. Háma studies this face, the soft down of a first beard, the skin unmarred by old scars or new wrinkles, and his heart trembles at the thought of all that this boy never got to do or have. A whole lifetime that was yet to be lived, with loves to be found, achievements to be celebrated, misfortunes to be endured, contentment to be earned. His death is a tragedy of lost hopes, of all that might have been had the boy been given even the twenty extra years that Háma himself has had. And that is the thought that brings a sudden and utter calm to Háma’s spirit, quietly reassuring despite the looming specter of gruesome execution treading closer and closer each second.

He cannot see his own imminent death as a tragedy like this boy’s, for Háma has lived — not as long as many men, but fully and well. He has loved and been loved. He has made himself and others proud. He has laughed and cried and grinned and gasped. He has seen great beauty, heard words of great kindness, tasted much that was sweet, felt hands of true tenderness. He has served a land he reveres, one that he knows in his heart will prevail and find a way off its knees to stand tall once again. He has joined himself to people worth dying for, people that he would weep to leave if not for the knowledge that he was more fortunate than most to have ever had such people in his life, no matter how briefly. A wife who was the love that made all the others irrelevant. A daughter who was every bit as perfect as she adoringly believed him to be. Another baby that would arrive in four months’ time and bring consolation and joy to its mother when she’d need it most. They will be pained to lose him, but he trusts their strength, the kind that isn’t sharp and brittle like iron but binds and flexes like thread.

Amid all the suffering of the world, he has been blessed, his fate woven together so tightly with filaments of gladness and fulfillment and favor that those things can never be sundered from him, even now at the very end. When the first axemen crowd around him at last, he doesn’t feel fear or hatred or regret. He feels only gratitude for all that he’s been given. When an enemy first takes his leg at mid-thigh and then his arm at the elbow, he isn’t thinking of the pain. He is thinking only of how one man could be so lucky, how he had somehow managed to claim not only his share of good in the world but many times that much. When a blade takes his ear and iron-toed boots prod where his ribs no longer provide resistance, he hears Brytta’s sweet voice calling his name and feels Hálwinë’s soft cheek rested against his chest. And when the last rattling breath leaves his battered lungs, sighing softly from his bloodied lips, he looks right at the man above him and smiles. 

[eilinelsghost]

Absolutely speechless over this!!! I haven't been able to get the image of Finrod floating beneath Ivrin from In These Holy Waters out of my head, and I am just blown away by how @rinthecap brought it to life here!

The way the light moves through the water, the way his hair looks like molten gold, the bubbles and the crags along the shore and the way he is completely at rest in the water...! I love everything about this 😍

A quick smile flashed across the water. Then his breath rushed in and he dropped without warning beneath the mere. “Nóm?” Balan peered after him, first in bewilderment and then in unease. He could see the figure hovering below him, only an arm’s length or two he guessed, but it gave no sign of rising. He held another moment, attempting to gauge the depth, then filled his own lungs and plunged after him. The cold pressed in at his ears as he heaved himself downwards. Nóm had not seemed far down, he calculated, the water thrumming around him, and his own descent was swift. He must have come nearly level with the other by now. His arms reached out through the current, slowing his motion, and he opened his eyes. It was pristine. Light flooded down from the noontide sun and pierced deep into the basin. He could see all the way to the shore, the crags where he had perched only a few minutes before shining crisp and vivid through the water. And there to his right—Nóm dazzling in the midst of it. A cloud of gold, his hair floating about him; his body suspended as though caught in glass with the shimmering light cascading along its facets.

from In These Holy Waters, part 14 of the Atandil series

Commission for @eilinelsghost ✨✨

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Y’ALL!!! The lovely tag wranglers at AO3 have made Guthláf/Wídfara a CANONICAL TAG!!! It will autofill for you if you start typing either of their names!!!

And just for ONE FIC (mine!) that falls under that relationship tag! I am unreasonably happy about this. Here’s to my boys! (Seen here courtesy of @ rinthecap)

Special shoutout to @hobbitwrangler who brought this to my attention and is the incredibly talented writer behind several other official AO3 relationship tags with a single fic behind them! Here’s to everyone who made a truly rare pair, either romantic or platonic! (Feel free to shout out your own!) It’s strangely gratifying to see them carve out a little formal recognition in the endless media stream that is AO3. ♥️

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

For a reason I can't tell you yet 🤐, I'm thinking a lot about Bryttalíf and Hálwinë today... Do you want to tell us some headcanons you have for them?

I WILL make my own headcanon public once it's not a spoiler for unpublished pHORSE chapters anymore! (Not that they will appear in pHORSE, only that the HC is related to some of my OCs who haven't had their big reveals yet!)

I am very intrigued that there is any kind of connection between my Háma’s family and a HC of your pHORSE story, and I look forward to hearing more about it (at the appropriate time of course)!

I’m about to unload probably way more than you ever needed/wanted to know, but I’m not sure the fic I was working on that would include a lot of this is gonna work so I might as well spoil it all! So, here’s a bunch about Háma’s family, which also naturally features lots of Háma himself!

Art by @ rinthecap (I’ve got no art of Háma’s family but imagine he’s thinking about them!)

—Bryttalif (Brytta to her friends) was originally from Harrowdale. Growing up in the mountains gave her a hearty constitution — she was outdoorsy and strong and not afraid of hard work or getting dirty.

—Her father was a swordsmith, and they moved to Edoras when she was a teen because there was a bigger market for his work there. But a capital city is a more expensive place to live, and so Brytta trained as a midwife in order to add another income to the family. She was a natural, and by her mid-20’s she was the most popular midwife in Edoras, known for being especially calm and efficient.

—Because she was unmarried, she still lived at home. Her father was *extremely* domineering, and both Brytta and her mother spent a lot of their time trying to avoid upsetting him.

—He pushed her *hard* into a relationship with Grigan, the son of one of the wealthiest merchants in the city. She liked Grigan well enough — he was much nicer than her father, at least — and she wanted to please her parents, who clearly thought the match would be advantageous for all of them, so she tried to make Grigan happy even though she never loved him.

—That resulted in her getting pregnant while they were still courting, and Grigan freaked out. He ran, leaving Edoras to go stay at a family estate in the Westfold, and refused to acknowledge that he’d ever had anything to do with her.

—This obviously made things very hard for her — the gossips and scolds of Edoras had a lot to say about an unwed pregnant woman (fed by damage control from Grigan’s family), and her father, in particular, was furious with her for having “ruined” his plans. But into this chaos and unhappiness walked Háma!

—He met her by chance when he came to commission a sword from her father. (Their meet-cute is here as a WIP snippet.) They started to spend time together, and she fell for him hard, knowing almost immediately that she felt far differently about Háma than she’d ever felt about Grigan or any other man.

—She was (happily) shocked when he seemed to like her just as much. He didn’t care what anyone else thought of her (“a man of worth trusts in his own wisdom”) and wasn’t put off by the idea that she was going to have a baby (“often times the best things in life are those that were unlooked for”).

—There was quite a stir in town when people found out that Háma had taken up with her. It even came up when he was considered for promotion to captain of the king’s guards. One of the king’s advisors asked what it said about him that he was consorting with someone like Brytta; Háma answered that Brytta was clever and kind and brave, and so it said that he was a lucky man. (He got the promotion, obviously, with Théoden reasoning that a man of unshakable loyalty is exactly who he wanted in charge of his safety.)

—The stir quieted down fairly quickly once people realized the whole situation was a lot less interesting and salacious when there was a loving couple at the center of it. And in all the best ways, Háma and Brytta were boring — they got engaged and were happy and lived a quiet life with a small, tight circle of friends and family.

—When Hálwinë was born, Háma loved her like she’d always been in his plans. She was even registered as “Hálwinë, daughter of Háma” (Háma cried when Brytta asked him if he’d like to be Hálwinë’s legal father). When he and Brytta were finally married two months later, he carried Hálwinë through the whole ceremony.

—Hálwinë was an enormous daddy’s girl. She loved to braid his hair (badly), go for rides on his shoulders and listen to him tell stories. He was her first hero.

—It tickled her to see the other guards all treat him with the respect due to a superior — she didn’t totally understand it, but she could clearly see that her dad was Important and she agreed!

—Once he became door warden, she liked to visit him while he sat watch, and Théoden knew her by sight from how often Brytta brought her to Meduseld to see Háma, give him a hug and sit with him for a few minutes.

—(Incidentally, she became a bit fixated during these visits on Gríma, who she saw often. After Gríma scowled at her once, Háma told her that Gríma was a sad man who used his sadness as an excuse to be mean. This made her decide that Gríma just needed a friend, and so she tried repeatedly to befriend him, always waving and saying hi and sometimes bringing him little flowers she’d picked or a treat that Brytta had intended for her. Gríma found this very confusing and eventually told Háma to keep his brat away from him; this is the closest Háma ever came to murder.)

—Hálwinë was barely 6 when Háma died. She had a hard time truly understanding what had happened and would periodically ask Brytta when he was coming home. It wasn’t until the next year, when Brytta was able to take her to Helm’s Deep to see his grave, that it really sank in. She went back to visit him there regularly for the rest of her life.

—Brytta was 5 months pregnant when Háma died. She had a boy and named him Wilspell (“welcome news”). The need to care for Hálwinë and Wilspell carried Brytta through this extraordinarily painful time, along with the love and support of Háma’s sisters and the guards, who looked in on their old captain’s family often.

—Once Hálwinë and Wilspell (“Willie”) were old enough, Brytta went back to work and was the one to deliver Éomer’s kids because she was *still* the best midwife in Edoras and would be until she retired.

—Grigan came back to Edoras to take over his family’s business when Hálwinë was 13, and he and Brytta inevitably crossed paths. He sort of apologized, and she told him it was all for the best because things had worked out much better for her without him. She asked Hálwinë if she wanted to meet him, but Hálwinë had no interest in a father that wasn’t Háma.

—Brytta never remarried, though she had offers. When she died, she was buried at Helm’s Deep beside Háma, the only woman buried there among the war dead.

So…like I said, way more than you probably wanted! Thanks for asking and hope it wasn’t a total overload! (And yes, the Háma of my HC is a dream, he’s a dream based in reality — I borrowed the Háma - Brytta love story from an elderly relative of mine, who was pregnant and unmarried in the 40’s when she met the love of her life!)

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

I write first and foremost for myself, but I’m not dead inside and so, of course, I love any opportunity to hear other people’s thoughts about my own characters and stories that I love so deeply. And there is something extra special about seeing someone else’s interpretation of your words and ideas through visual art. All of which is to say that I described Guthláf and Wídfara from Where Now the Horse and the Rider to @rinthecap and they made THIS:

And it is really hard for me to put in words how I feel about it other than, of course, LOVE 😍. I think anyone who had read the story would be able to tell you who was who without a second thought and not because of any physical description of them in the writing. It’s in the VIBE that they both have. Of course Wídfara is pushing through his fears so that they can be together, and of course Guthláf is right there to comfort and reassure. I could write page after page about how insanely good the balancing of color in the hair looks or how I love the detailing on Wídfara’s shirt and all those specific details – which is, of course, all 100% true! – but more than anything, I love the emotional truth of it…the way they each have a distinct personality and how those personalities are interacting with each other, which Rincap managed to capture so well in visual form from just some written words about what each guy is like.

SO, endless thanks again to Rincap (who is also the incredibly talented artist behind this Háma art!!!) for making me this truly special treat! ♥️♥️♥️ And if anyone is interested in a story about two guys in love in difficult circumstances; about figuring out how to honor your true self and letting those you love do the same even when that’s dangerous; about how things went down in Rohan during the war of the ring from the perspective of a regular person who never wielded any power or influence during those events…well, there are 4 chapters out now and 4 more still to come.