Work Text:
It affrighted you the first time, red blood trickling down your legs as if your vagina was a wound; and fearing that some grave illness was upon you, yea fearing even the death that you had chosen, thinking it was come for you prematurely, you ran to your husband, praying he had some leechcraft to mend your injury. But it was no injury, he said, but the natural state of women, and it would come for you monthly, and he had little more to say on it, nor could he be of much help elsewise. No one had warned you of this, but how could they? The elves of Doriath know little of Men, and why should your husband ponder the curse of women?
Is this some punishment afflicted upon his foremothers for listening to the enemy? It could not be, like death, a Gift, you think as heavy black clots slide from your body, thick and sticky to soak through the rag. It gets on your clothes, dyes the white wool red, dyes the bathwater pink, coagulates crimson in the chamber pot. You bleed like a wounded beast, and yet this blood is proof that you live, proof that the air was returned to your lungs and the beat to your heart. Proof that you will be able to bear a son.