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Without a doubt about it, Andreth was proud. How could she not be? She was whip-smart and had known that since childhood. At four she read both alphabets, at seven she taught herself Haladin with only the aid of one woman who married into the House of Bëor, and was known to ask around slyly about the Forbidden Tongue. Adanel soon found teaching her often meant little more than asking the right questions, and she remembered everything. She was quick and sharp-sighted, and beautiful in a striking way, the fitting child of a lordly house in more than just bearing. Her cousins complained no one should have as much of a good thing
Is it so strange then, that at fifteen she thought herself a marvel, that at sixteen the common illness of all youth that leads one think one has discovered everything worth knowing for the first time struck her with extraordinary might? For a while, if she had not been witty, she might have become insufferable.
Then she was seventeen and she saw the Eldar at near for the first time in five years.
When a child, she had been overawed in their company. They were bright, they were tall and great, their voices were fair, and their swords kept the enemy at bay. She had decided it must have been the glamour of youth in her eyes, later.
It had not.
She could hardly hold the gaze of those whose eyes held the light of Valinor, and it seemed at times as if it shone through their very skin. Her people had called her singing voice strong and clear, but there was power in theirs even as they spoke the simplest greetings. She could have listened enraptured for hours if not for envy.
But all this she could have borne, once the newness wore off. No, it was that at the age of seventeen, Andreth realised she was young, and that she would always be, in comparison. If she devoted her entire life to a single subject, she would never master it in a way that could compare. To them, all her thoughts, works, writings, would never be anything more than a child's clumsy art.
Maybe it is for this, that she threw herself headfirst into mystery, into the things no one knew, into the matter of Men and their fate, and cursed the curse upon mortals bitterly.
At seventeen, Andreth realised that the war would never be won in her lifetime, and she would never live long enough to find all the answers.
...Finrod once said that maybe they did not exist within the world... but then, that was just the sort of thing Finrod would say.