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rahjasmine · 28 days ago

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Recognition is a Sacred Thing | Finding Elriel

I haven’t come back to the fandom to stay. Not yet, at least. But I did just come back from a return to the story where it all started, which opened a door I hadn’t meant to enter, and here I am.

This is not a manifesto. I am not here to persuade in a place where narrative has blurred into noise, when I’ve already found my one clear note. I’m just here to remember. This is simply a quiet reflection on what I recognized in that clear note amid static, and how that recognition became my sanctuary.

This is not me looking ahead. Not for announcements, confirmation, resolution or closure. This is anti-closure, because that’s where yearning lives and yearning is where I live. This is me looking into the rearview mirror, at the story I was already told and the reflection it offered back. This is where I step into my own sanctuary, built in prose and memory, and leave the door ajar--for those who come quietly.

When I first read this series, years ago, I wasn’t looking for Elriel. I wasn’t reading it hoping to find a ship that spoke to me like they do. I was reading for the storytelling. I ended up finding a story written in whispers, in a genre that shouts. Something that started in the margins, slowly being written into the spine of the narrative.

I found it in glances and small gestures.

In a soft word breathed against the symbol of his shame, rewriting a lifetime of pain. Beautiful.

In a question asked, when others made decisions. An outstretched hand that gave her a voice, when the world had always spoken for her. Would you like me to show you the garden?

Peace and quiet.

I found it not just in Azriel, not just in Elain, but in the space between them. A space shaped like a home built inside a battlefield. It wasn’t grand, but intimate.

I wanted to live in it.

Finding Elriel was never a ship, nor a trope, to me. It felt like stumbling into a meadow after having spent years backed into a corner. It felt like reading a story that had listened to me first. A story not written in loud proclamations but in the tension between what is felt and what is allowed. A story not about what is shouted but what is left unsaid. Not about crescendo but about quiet alignment. The kind of love story I didn’t think romantasy made room for. One that didn’t demand attention but drew you in like arms held open in beckoning.

Reading them felt personal. Like I didn’t just read a story, it read me. It felt like Sarah had split my soul in two and given each half a name. Each one resonating with how I move through the world, how I love, how I carry silence and longing and how, sometimes, holding back feels like the only way to survive.

I relate to them.

They might have begun in the margins of someone else’s story, and to some they may not speak the way they do to me. But for those of us who’ve lived in margins--in the shadows or under the weight of a mould made for someone we’re not--it doesn’t take much to recognize what’s unfolding there.

To me, Elriel is for all the quiet souls used to being overlooked.

For those who are misread and told their story doesn’t deserve telling because it doesn’t demand to be heard over anyone else’s.

For those who’ve had to shrink themselves to survive the noise and mould themselves to the shape of someone else’s clay, just to survive.

For those who’ve learned to speak in glances and care in silence. Who’ve loved in secret because their love is wrong by the standards of someone louder.

For those who respond to the unsafe with internal exile, because they have nowhere left to go but inward.

For those who give trust slowly and carefully but give it fully when they do.

I am grateful that this is a story Sarah gave me even if it was never a story that yelled to be told.

So, what was the story I was given? What was it I found?

I found reverence. I found Azriel.

I found him neither in loud proclamations nor in battlefields, but in the tiny shape of a boy who once couldn’t speak and was punished for it. A boy locked in silence and darkness, who learned that shrinking was safer than asking to be seen. A boy who wore his silence like the dark surface of a still lake. Unreadable, but hiding a world roaring with the life he was never allowed to live. A boy meant for the sky, instead pressed beneath weight like a beautiful fossil. An echo of something wild and winged that should have been free to soar, instead preserved only because it was forced into compression.

The record of a life never lived.

Until he wasn’t just contained, he was containment incarnate.

A beautiful fossil in motion.

I saw that quiet boy turn into a quiet man who offered all he had--himself. And when the world took it, and took it for granted, he learned to vanish inside what was left.

He waits in silence, listens more than he speaks. He carries emotion like a blade tucked between his ribs because he feels everything so deeply that one wrong move feels like it would ruin him.

Restraint becomes the only form of survival.

He feels everything but says nothing. Not out of coldness, but out of reverence. Because he is the kind of man who follows the laughter of the woman he loves, just so he could be witness to her joy.

He rubs his temples when the room gets too loud, but when it’s only him and the woman he loves, he laughs softly at a joke meant for his ears alone.

He hides at family dinners, not because he doesn’t care but because caring hurts when you can’t act on it and your love language is acts of service.

He’s a man who would rather suffer in silence than disturb the shape of a precious memory. A man who would rather endure the ache if it means preserving the gift that made the world a little gentler, when gentleness has always been the shape of his sanctuary. The gift of a headache powder, meant to soothe but never used. Becasue in a world that won’t allow their love, memory becomes its only home.

It isn’t detachment, it is depth. It isn’t coldness, but reverence. Not passivity, but restraint. Because his reverence isn’t allowed an outlet. And then it folds in on itself like a dying star.

He’s not a man with nothing to say, but one fluent in a language most never learn to hear. The kind where love isn’t declared--it’s enacted. Shaped into gestures laid gently at another’s feet, asking nothing in return. Always there, offering everything, never assuming it would be seen, never placing himself at the centre of the giving. And when the offering goes unnoticed, no one thinks to ask what it cost to give. Becasue when care is quiet and offered willingly, it is easy to assume it comes without effort.

But even a wellspring can run dry.

I found a man pressed into emotional stasis by a world that only wanted him when he was useful. Carved into a pillar others leaned on--never once asked what it cost him to bear their weight. Because when the surface is still, no one asks if there’s a pulse, only how much more weight it can bear. And then the weight piles on, until stasis becomes sediment, and sediment hardens into stone. A beautiful fossil in motion, shaped by the weight that tried to bury him.

But even a stone erodes.

They didn’t just forget to check if his heart was beating before they buried him. They etched assumptions into his surface, just like they did to the boy who once couldn’t speak and was punished for it. Who became the bedrock they stood on. Needed but never known. Until not knowing him became rewriting him. Until he disappeared in plain sight, like a statue fades into ruin. Until he felt nothing, was nothing. Until only silence remained. And no one had ever listened to what it said.

But someone else found him too, and she didn’t flinch. She doesn’t try to crack the stone. She traces it--like fingertips over ancient inscriptions. She doesn’t try to break down walls by force. She is simply soft enough to slip through the cracks. Like mist sweeping through moors or a seedling breaking through concrete. She joins him where he is already hiding. She never demands that he speaks, she simply listens to his being. She brushes the dust off the fossil--not to expose him, but to see him. To reveal that echo of a life never lived until she hears its pulse.

And then he comes alive.

In the strange, disorienting way of someone rediscovering their pulse. A hand offered. A soft chuckle. A small smile he can’t hide.

And then she blushes and takes his hand.

She gives him soft things. Not to impress, but to comfort. Gifts shaped into memories, where their love is safe. Settling like moss on stone--soft, quiet and alive. She says, “I saw how the world wears on you. Let me make it softer. Let me let you rest.” In return, he takes the weight off her shoulders and says, “Sit, I’ll take care of it”. In a world full of warriors, he centres the quietest woman in the room.

Because she listened for the pulse no one else had sought.

I found grace. I found Elain.

I found a girl shaped by the expectation to be pleasing and palatable. A girl who learned to measure her own presence carefully, to make herself small to keep the world around her undisturbed, just to preserve the only version of peace she was allowed.

Her silence was mistaken for emptiness. Because she lived in a world where speaking yourself into being was required, so if she said nothing, she must be nothing. A girl who was assumed oblivious because she didn’t correct their assumptions. Who stayed silent not because she was empty--not because she was nothing--but because her inner world was too sacred to her to pour it into anyone who hadn’t shown they could be trusted with it.

I found a girl that turned into a woman suffocating beneath the comfort others built on her erasure and, still, she remained kind.

She’s so soft, people assume she’ll break under pressure. But her softness is never fragility, it is fortitude. She doesn’t break. She isn’t delicate. She's Like lavender, softening the air after storms and drought. Like hydrangea, shifting hue with the soil beneath her. She bends, adapts, and survives--and still offers kindness.

She’s not passive, she’s attuned. She doesn’t interrupt a room, she reads it. She sees what hurts and doesn’t demand an explanation. She simply answers, without having been asked to. That is not passivity, but the most deliberate of actions. That is a gardener. One who tends not just to plants but to people. One who doesn’t just make things grow, but notices what’s buried beneath the surface. She is what would emerge if sunshine were given form. Someone nurturing and life-giving.

I found a woman who builds things. Who creates warmth and peace with her own hands and offers it freely. Her gifts are not performative, but precise. Not posturing, but personal. A joke no one else would understand. A remedy only someone who had been watching, and cared about what she saw, would think to give.

Someone else found her too, and he didn’t try to mould her into something louder. He doesn’t look at her as if her softness is a symptom or a flaw, as if she can’t possibly know her own mind. He never tries to protect her from herself but protects her right to be herself. He doesn’t need for her to prove her worth but simply recognizes it.

He sees her, quiet and attuned and fluent in his mother tongue. Spoken not in words but in silence and offerings. He understands that her silence isn’t absence. It is presence, veiled. Pulse, buried. Like fossils whispering of a world before language. Like roots humming with life beneath a garden. He knows that, sometimes, silence is the loudest kind of saying--if someone only knows how to listen.

He is not a rescuer but a refuge. A quiet clearing. A man who offers not demands or conditions, but presence. And for the woman whose life was always ruled by the expectations of others, that kind of love isn’t just comforting--it is clarity. It is realizing that she never needed to become anything louder to be worth love. That kind of love is permission. That she doesn’t have to speak herself into being, she already is. And who she already is--graceful, attentive, and caring--is not only enough, but it is revered.

She blushes, he waits. She offers, he stays. And then, she permits. And in that rhythm, something grows. Neither fast, nor loud, but steady and alive. A trust born not of words, but of gestures. Of presence. Of fluent silence.

Their mother tongue.

I found a sanctuary. I found Elriel.

I found a love story that began in the margins but never as an afterthought. A romance that is as structured and intentional as a sonnet--restrained, precise and elegant--because what is being said is too sacred and intimate to pour freely. A thing of secret, lovely beauty passed from hand to hand in silence.

It’s a romance that lives in glances and brushing fingers. In offerings, and in the weight of words not spoken aloud but through actions and through how the body always betrays our innermost longings.

Because even the quiet ones have crushes.

You see it in the bob of a throat, the sudden stillness of breath, a smile blooming, cheeks blushing. In the aching pauses where no one says it, but everything is already said through gazes that linger. You see it in how she doesn’t ask him to speak, yet he speaks more freely with her than anyone else. You see it in the way he never asks her to be bold for him, but she is anyway. Like a secret, lovely and slightly wicked thing, wrapped in the quiet of night. And he just chuckles softly, as if to say, “don’t worry, I’ll keep it safe.”

It is the kind of romance I didn’t expect to find in this genre. I braced for spectacle, loud declarations, drama and battles. Instead I found that romance shaped not like a battlefield but like a home. Soft and comforting. Not like raging fires or burning embers, but like the warmth of flickering tea-lights in a kitchen window.

They don’t have the banter of enemies turning lovers. But the intimacy of two quiet souls looking at the world and finding each other in its quietest corner. Their jokes are whispered behind the world’s back, meant only for each other. Not through a dynamic of antagonism but one of allegiance with each other, against a world that always misunderstood them. An intimacy so deep its' painful.

After never having been fully seen, after having given up on translating their beings into the language of a world that never bothered to offer them the same courtesy, they found someone who understands them without needing translation. Without needing to bend or mould or change. They see each other as they are, not as the world demands they be. They never try to fix what is tender, they never try to harden what is soft. They offer not challenge but presence, space and a place to breathe.

Azriel is reverence. Elain is grace. Together, they are a sanctuary. A clear note amid static. An exhale. A place where nothing needs to be forced into clarity, because they have already chosen to meet each other in the dark, where no one else thought to look, in the quietest corner of the world. And in that corner they’ve seen each other.

To me, Elriel is what happens when containment is finally allowed relief. When longing is not ripped apart by rushing, but softened into something peaceful and deep. When people who have always held their breath around others finally find that one person who lets them exhale. It’s that open meadow after a lifetime backed into corners or pressed beneath layers of weight.

Elriel was not a pairing I came looking for. It is one I recognized. Because it spoke a language I already understood. My mother tongue.

I don’t want to stop writing whatever this is, because I don’t want to leave this sanctuary. This was meant to stay a private reflection, but I’ll make my holy place open to the public just this once.

To me, finding Elriel was like stepping into a sanctuary. Finding Elriel was like being seen. Quietly, from across a loud room, by someone who already spoke my language, even when I hadn’t said a word.

Perhaps this post should have stayed a draft. But recognition is a sacred thing. And I wanted to honour it.

And I didn’t want to leave on a note of weariness. I wanted to leave on that clear note I found amid static.

I wanted to leave something beautiful behind, before I go.

I’m closing the door to this sanctuary again, for now. But I’ll leave the key under the flower pot. In case I return.

Or in case you want to.

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