Stories of Arda - Lord of the Rings Fan-Fiction Archive

They had argued over the first apple. Erestor, who had once tried to eat holly berries when he was very young, observed the strange fruit’s rosy skin and decided that it was probably poisonous. The red so vividly revealed by the recently arisen Sun struck him as a warning. Bauglir had scarred the starlit world too deeply to walk incautiously in this bright dawn; not all new saplings unfurling into daylight were to be trusted.

“It’s delicious,” said his incautious companion, ignoring him. “Try it.”

When Erestor was young, he had seen birds eating berries from that tree, scarlet berries from a tree whose every part was poison. The shadow-tree, the elders said, and told of a Dark Rider whose hooves had thundered before the Sundering. Terrors invading every glade and twisting thorns and snakelike vines that throttled Elves in flight. That was when the tree whose every part was medicine became a thing of death. And yet the birds still ate the scarlet berries and did not die.

Ages later, he saw Men burying their dead beneath the shadow-tree and wondered what it meant.

This was a memory that Dior Eluchíl treasured in later years: his laughing father teaching him, one-handed, to spar beneath the green leaves of Tol Galen with willow staves. “Not like that!” and “Keep your foot in!” and “Very good, you’re improving!” While Dior ducked and danced and swung, seeking to imitate his father’s effortless precision, aware of his mother’s smile when she passed by.

At last, “This is for you,” said his father and held out an exquisitely sheathed sword. “From your grandfather.”

The King was dead. So said the messengers sent to Tol Galen. His blood blackened the stone of his own city. The Queen had passed from Middle-earth and Doriath lay ungirdled, Melian’s shadow-webs unspun from sunlit Neldoreth and Region and nightingale-haunted Nan Elmoth, where Melian and Elu Thingol had entranced each other beneath the silent stars.

Hence the Dwarven war-host spilling down from Ered Luin. The messengers blanched. No warnings had come to Menegroth.

From Tol Eressëa had come already evergreens to blossom across the bay: fragrant oiolairë and slender lairelossë, red-berried yavannamirë graciously lowering its fruit-heavy branches, nessamelda and sweet vardarianna and the pale, peeling bark of taniquelassë. Now the white ships brought nuts to raise silver pillars to the sky. Malinorni, the trees were called, or mellyrn in a more familiar tongue. The budding beech-like leaves glistened in the summer sun. In five hundred years, said the Elves of Eressëa, this new gift would brush the stars.

Erestor remembered nightingale-haunted beech groves from a different age. But he dreamed of golden woods.

“A fair tree grows in Armenelos,” said his visitors. “It flowers in the evening. They say Yavanna grew the first of its kind in the likeness of Telperion, the Tree Bauglir destroyed. Galathilion, that one was called, and from Galathilion came the White Tree of Tol Eressëa, which is named Celeborn.”

“‘Tree of Silver’,” said Celeborn, amused. “An inventive people, the Elves of Eressëa.”

He saw the glance his visitors shared. “The White Tree of Númenor is called Nimloth. From Ninquelótë, they say.”

Her screams echoed in his ears again, slaughtered amid smoke and stone trees at Dior’s side.

“How sorrowfully he laments her,” sighed Goldberry and tipped her head to listen while her hands gathered lace-white mushrooms without pause. “How sadly he plays! The flute was well-made, dear one.”

“Eh, no hard task!” said Tom Bombadil. “If the Elf’s singing pleases my fair Goldberry, naught be too much trouble! But he is a woeful fellow. Why, my merriest songs cheer him not at all!”

His eyes glinted in the shadows beneath the pine boughs. Goldberry threw him a reproving glance. “You should not tease him so!”

Storm clouds darkened above the pallid cliffs, edged with sulphurous yellow as the last of the day burned off in a smoky blaze. The new road with its serrated hedges stretched alongside the Sirannon’s sunset-bloodied waters. “I tried holly berries once,” recalled Erestor. “Not a good idea.”

“I was young.” He glanced up the valley. The doors of Hadhodrond stood open in the distance. “So are the Jewel-smiths. They think their work will last forever.”

All around, the walls of what was very nearly Imladris arose in jutting jigsaw pieces above the rushing Bruinen. The builders were working slowly as the light faded and the savoury smells of dinner began to drift through the valley. Far overhead a couple of early stars glittered against the deepening indigo evening. Erestor lounged in the green shadows of a spreading oak and contemplated invisibility.

“There you are,” said Melinna, appearing unexpectedly. “Did Elrond find you earlier?”

“Thought not.” She sat down beside him. “This tree comes down tomorrow. They want the wood to make doors.”

Written for Linda Hoyland and the prompt: what if Lúthien and Arwen could meet?

(“What was she like?” she had asked once, curled up in a nest of nightingale cushions. “Was she very beautiful?”)

It was late afternoon and the air was golden. The new tapestry glowed on the loom. Arwen tilted her head thoughtfully, contemplating her great-great-grandmother. “She looks like my father,” she decided at last. “Do I?”

Snow lay thick underfoot. Dawn dreamt an hour into the future and it was still snowing, flakes tumbling crazily everywhere through a maze of winter-stripped branches glittering ice-white against the greying dark. His passing left no traces. The wind whipped snow through his eyes and burned on the edge of his breath.

He recalled saying: no need to worry yet. No one's going anywhere till spring.

The bridge lay ahead, treacherous. Snowdrifts piled up against Menegroth's black gates. He sprinted on through the blurring night.

The snow ceased to fall with the fading of what little daylight had lent its pallor to the dissipating banks of cloud. It lessened imperceptibly, the wind trailing away and the tumbling flakes dwindling into a gradual, drawn-out nothingness that left the evening clear and cold and sharp as glass.

As a shattered lantern. Erestor stared into the fire and saw burning tapestries. Smoke everywhere. Blood spurting hot across his face.

He leaned forwards abruptly. Snow glistened against his fingers. It did not melt.

Fleeing Doriath's midwinter ruin, the Sirion was a torrent: snow-swollen, choked with the dead. Southwards it bore the bleeding survivors to the sea. Amid the foaming mouths their camp was made, a scattering of Thingol's people and those who had followed Dior. And there they remained.

It was autumn and the Sirion was torrential again when a flood of refugees came south down the river's bronze-edged bank. Beneath Nan-Tathren's willows they had shed their grief; now they sang the glories of shattered Gondolin.

The Gondolindrim planned to settle there. Wandering the torrent's shore, Erestor stared northwards, dreaming of ruins abandoned.

Lying on the riverbank beneath a willow's weeping cave. Beyond a curtain of green branches, restlessly stirring the water, the Valar tore apart the night. Darkness shattered into fragments, brilliantly outlined. Erestor traced the heavens parting at the seams.

"Maybe lightning shows up the cracks in the sky," he said. "Maybe that's behind everything. Fire and light..."

Her gaze was lost in the interlaced shadows of their shelter. She did not turn her head.

Grass speared up between scattered rubble mounds. Clambering up the slope to reach the barrow was dangerous, Tol Sirion's natural contours distorted by massive blocks of far-flung stone and ivy-netted pits, leaves fluttering over bottomless rainwater wells. Everywhere shone sunlight, clear and serene, a golden glimmer brightening every jagged, broken slab or white edge still pristine, sculpted by Elven hands when Finrod Felagund had raised this shattered tower in bygone days.

A tempest had scoured away the shadow of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Erestor recalled Lúthien taking up the Nauglamír, more brilliant than the Silmaril set blazing amid an array of lesser jewels.

The cave was larger than the cleft in the cliffs had suggested, a sandy-floored cavern concealed behind creeping ivy. Leaves fluttered as the storm broke with a vengeance, roaring its displeasure in the thunder. All around pooled shadows, liquid-dark, as black as ink.

"Good timing," said Melinna, blinking away the aftereffects of lightning. "Cosy, too. Good place to spend the winter."

"We ought to check," said Erestor reasonably, already disappearing into the dark.

"Oh, not that one!" came the protesting chorus. "We've heard it a thousand times!"

Erestor raised his eyebrows at his audience. Sprawled out on the carpet, Elrond's twins blinked up with those clear grey eyes that always called to mind starlight and nightingale feathers. Arwen perched hopefully on Melinna's weaving stool, her skirt spilling blue silk over her bare feet.

Rain hammered at the window. The gale had chased them all the way to Imladris, catching at their cloaks.

Fingertips brushed against her sleeve. "Melinna," said Elrond's daughter, light as a bird on her bare white feet. Her eyes shone. "Melinna, is Bree really so dusty in the summer that a dragon could run through the streets without being noticed?"

"A dragon?" Melinna turned away from Celebrían's half-finished tapestry with a blink. "You couldn't even squeeze one through the gates. Why?"

"That's different," she said solemnly. "Odd people appear in a Bree dust storm. We met an urchin once – maybe Erestor already told you..."

Elrond sat bewildered beneath a storm of words. Dragon cubs and urchins tumbled through Bree's summer dust – and Dwarves were everywhere hunting mithril – but was it true, about the collapsing mountain? A distressed damsel had been rescued and at least one Vala was involved somehow. And had Melinna's hair really once been –

"The first that came to mind," said Erestor cheerfully. "But wasn't the dust storm a good touch?"

"– and so the dust blew away and all the Men saw the dragon cub!" finished Arwen. "That's what Erestor said, anyway. And they would have torn it apart, Melinna told me, if not for the urchin – but is it true?"

"Is what true, dear?" said Celebrían, adrift in the heavens stretching blue beneath her fingers.

As Arwen stalked huffily away, Celebrían shook her head fondly and reached for a skein of cloud-white wool. What an utterly absurd tale. Whirlwinds in Bree!

Soot and filth marred the rubble. Ghastly over the remnants hung Gondolin's ghost, a spectre arisen from shattered pillars and the dragon-scarred stones of torn-down walls. Rats skittered in the marble ruins and some broken fountain somewhere still spilled murky water endlessly down the dripping steps.

Gold patterns trailed up charred doorposts. No door remained. Of the tower's inhabitants, only bones lingered. Erestor stumbled over an object cast carelessly away.

A scratched round stone etched with golden flowers. He passed it to Melinna. "A doorstop?"

There was blood on the stones heaped up by the pass, but it had long since dried to a bad memory beneath new grass and blossoming celandine. Spring was fresh in the air, the sunlight shining cool and clear past frosted peaks, and the birds were singing. The flower-etched stone was heavy in Melinna's hand.

"They care about their own dead, the Noldor," she said. "I wonder, did Fëanor's sons bury Dior? We should leave something on the grave."

"You must have found Glorfindel's tower," said Idril Celebrindal. "I saw him with this when we crossed the Helcaraxë. It was worse than the worst winter you can imagine. We had only what we could carry. But everyone kept something to remind them of those they'd left behind..."

Her eyes glistened. Abruptly, she thrust the flower-etched stone back into Erestor's hands.

"Glorfindel brought that," she said and walked away, disappearing into the stands of wild buckwheat in flower around the burgeoning settlement.

They watched her go. "That's all very well," said Melinna, "but is it a paperweight or a doorstop?"

The grains were reddish, sifting through Celebrían's fingers. She tapped the box so that its furrowed contents settled back into a level plane. "Brighter than madder?" she said. "Remarkable."

"Yes, in the east. Very small trees – some are almost bushes – but they have acorns and oak leaves. These grains bloom on the sprigs. The mortal women living in those parts collect them in their mouths."

"Remarkable," said Celebrían again. "Of course, it's hotter there. I wonder whether it would grow here?"

A pot bubbled over a cheerful campfire. Erestor examined a bundle of roots with fastidious displeasure. "Melinna," he said. "Do I look like a horse? Because if not, what is this madder –"

"That's not for eating," said Melinna and whisked it out of his hands. "I found a patch across the valley. I've been meaning to re-dye your belt for a while; it's faded nearly to orange."

"Of course we must be elegantly dressed," yawned Erestor, "while wandering the wilderness. Galadriel and that child of hers are a bad influence on you. If not madder, what are we eating tonight?"

It was summer and the downs were aflame with flowering broom, a blaze of yellow across the sunlit hillsides. Melinna took a stem apart a piece at a time, laying out a crown of silken petals in the grass. "Dyer's greenweed," she said and crushed one thoughtfully between her fingers, so that a little juice came out. "We grow this at Imladris. It's good for yellow, almost as good as weld. That's with white alumen. And then you overdye it with woad and get green, of course..."

A plumed cavalier plunged into a chasm. Blueness edged his sword and his cloak streamed verdigris-green behind him. They had commented on the nobility of his expression and the stupidity of his horse; and Erestor had supposed the scene was Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and Melinna had proposed Númenor's fall, and they certainly would not have identified Beren Camlost even if Melinna had not commented enviously on the vividness of his painted garments. "Green's a difficult colour."

"The artist managed," said Erestor, imitating the cavalier. "Can't you use paint?"

The twins bounced happily away, duty done. After a moment, Celebrían leaned forwards and fished a leaf from the salad bowl. It was long and smooth and glossy green; it was also distressingly representative of the bowl's contents. She considered it doubtfully.

"No, it doesn't," said Melinna. "Why were they gathering salad in the dye-garden anyway?"

Celebrían sighed. "Elbereth knows! Curiosity? I told them to keep away when everything was flowering and the bees were out." She peered into the bowl again. "Tell me, did you need any blue thread?"

This box was packed with powder, black and very fine. "Now I know about this," said Celebrían, tracing a spiral over the surface. Particles clung to her fingertip and darkened the pale edge of her nail. "Twenty silver pennies a pound in Ost-in-Edhil. They used to fake certain gemstones with it – emerald, I think, and beryl as well. Chrysoprase, possibly. It made the bluest paint I've ever seen. Doesn't it come from the slime on the eastern swamp grasses?"

Melinna grinned. "That's what they say. It's a plant, actually, with purple flowers. And it dyes a deeper blue than woad."

Elrond sank into a chair. "They were giggling," he said incredulously. "I could hear them giggling."

"Women do that sometimes. Don't worry. They probably weren't giggling about you."

He returned himself to Daeron's song and the woods of Doriath. When he glanced up again, Elrond was still there, his eyes narrowed to suspicious slits.

But he remembered Melinna talking about Celebrían's new recipe for alkanet, and the pansy-bright violet dye they hoped to brew.

This set received second place in MEFA 2010 (Times: First Age and Prior: Mixed Drabbles).

Nostalgia

Everything Is Illuminated

There had been a time...

... when twilight stretched endless, stars spattered in milky array across an eternal night. He remembered the brilliance of Wilwarin's wings and Menelmacar's belt shining and Valacirca swinging sickle-edged, a northern warning. White in the grass beneath Eglador's grey branches bloomed the night-flower niphredil, springing up under Lúthien's feet.

Fishing for starlight in the Esgalduin's shimmering depths. He remembered that too.

And now –

– the stars faded nightly into glimmering pinpricks, extinguished by day –

Below rushed the Bruinen, foam-flecked in the summer sun. "I preferred twilight," admitted Erestor. "Melinna laughs at me. But now everything is illuminated."

When All The World Was An Oyster
Stealing Beauty

"Those hairpins? The Dwarves made them for us long ago."

... before Doriath's fall or Thingol's death, before the Sun's flaming birth and the fiery day, before the sculpting of Menegroth's stone forests beyond the Esgalduin. An island washed by warm, shallow waters had harboured the ships of the Falathrim. They had chased starlight through the glassy waves and dried themselves, salt-glittering and singing, on twilit beaches. Returning to the Sindar, they carried with them Círdan's gift, a treasure-chest to pay for Thingol's subterranean city. Their own pockets had been crammed with pearls, a wealth of beauty stolen from the sea.

Remnants of Future Enemies
Stardust

"Once we went north, chasing the swing of the Sickle of the Valar..."

North into a desolate and broken land. The tale still lingered that once the earth had groaned and fires raged in the distant heavens. They came light-foot from the Falathrim with the sea-song in their ears and passed out of Eglador through Ered Gorgoroth and pine-clad Dorthonion. Ard-galen's plain stretched dusk-grey before them. Onwards they wandered. Twilight deepened to midnight and the shadows darkened dangerously; alight in the gloom shone seven white lamps.

Beyond Ard-galen, Udûn and Angband, frost crisping black and jagged ruins like Valacirca's dust.

Flight
The Flight of the Phoenix

"A bird that renews itself through conflagration?" said Erestor. "It's an interesting thought. But I don't know where the story came from. I think someone once claimed to have seen one flying over Dorthonion before the first dawn..."

... fleeing the frost-crisped ruins of Angband and midnight Udûn, a slew of teeth and poison claws snatching at their cloaks. Behind them ominous Valacirca and Ard-galen endless before them, sea-shadowy with the wind rippling waves through long grass. Far ahead loomed the mountains, jagged beneath the stars.

A comet blazed white across twilit heavens, trailing a tail like a bird on fire.

Tempora Mutantur
A Game of Thrones

... silver spilling over green leather, coins from a dozen mints and more in shining disarray...

... he had seen coins first in Nogrod and Belegost, when the Dwarves went from trading ingots to metal discs stamped with their king's mark. Bewildering to Elves accustomed to bartering skins and silver songs: what was silver but an ornament? In Eglador, the Queen amid nightingales and niphredil had counted out throne-stamped silver admiringly. What a clever idea. But the coins were scattered among Eglador's children and lost like marbles in countless childish games...

Elrond's daughter plucked another coin. "And this one? Where's it from?"

Silver King
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Arwen's departure left Erestor's desk still coin-strewn. Kings, so many silver kings...

... all these new kingdoms sprung up like mushrooms, their Dúnedain masters claiming a title an Elf who never minted coins had worn...

... he remembered Elu Thingol, walking Maia-bright beneath shadowed boughs. The sylvan court first found in Eglador, a shimmering realm of starlit woods, Thingol and his Queen ruling through those twilight years of youth and innocence. Age after age his command increasing, owned from Círdan's mariners to the mountains of Erestor's birth. Wherever they wandered, seeking every far side of the world, they had carried Thingol's fame.

Mappa Mundi
The Road

Vellum everywhere, unscrolled in red and black and gold and blue and green. "I can't believe you don't have any maps," said Glorfindel again, awash with imagined worlds.

"Why?" said Erestor. "Maps only show roads."

"That's not –"

– true. Perhaps. But all the outlined rivers and mountains scrawled roads across the unmarked page. You shall walk here, maps said; and: this is the shape the world should be. Stay on the path.

Erestor remembered a world without paths. And watching Dwarves with maps carving the first road beneath Mount Dolmed's shoulders, bewildered. How could anyone see the stars and be lost?

Wind and Stone
Pathfinder

The Dwarves had spoken of paths sleeping throughout Beleriand and Eriador.

They should be found, they said, these paths. Trodden. Awoken. They should be mapped and dug out and paved with stone brushed grey by twilight. Signposts should be raised and waystations established and inns built for weary travellers. No town or village or hamlet or city deep-delved beneath ancient forests should be left to slumber. The paths dreamed of being free.

Dwarves had strange ideas. They had spoken of stone and of bones beneath earth, and Erestor had saved his laughter for the wind flying pathless among the peaks.

City of Memory
Noble House

The tentative title was Noble Houses of the Noldor. Noble houses... that metaphor must have come from Aman. Or the Dúnedain. Those cities piled on Númenor's fragrant slopes...

... what would it have been in Doriath? Thingol's 'noble cavern'?

Deep in memory delved Menegroth with its golden lanterns and gilded branches, a host of jewelled birds peeping between verdigris leaves. Tapestries woven by the Queen and her ladies softening every sculpted cave. A splash of light tossed up by silver fountains bubbling in marble basins, the image so clear...

... he would suggest a different title. Noldorin Genealogies. Nothing metaphorical in that.

Beacon
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

The light. It was the light that blazed brightest in Erestor's memories of returning to Eglador.

Ablaze as a beacon amid shifting shadows: gold lanterns spilling light through the grey gloaming, the Esgalduin foaming silver, an enchanted mirror of broken starlight. In a hueless world, Eglador had been vivid: the richness of the tapestries, of butterfly-bright garments, of the sculpted city's jewels and the woods in their splendour. Of those who welcomed them back, time after time.

Daeron's nightingale harp sang beneath Erestor's hands. Tell everything! and Tinfang's laughter. Ivaeron asking, How dark is the darkness at the world's end?

Sic Transit Gloria
FlashForward

At world's end, it's so dark fire won't burn... we saw a bird flying flaming over Dorthonion... the Dwarves gave us these, they call them 'coins'... oh, the sea, water forever without a far shore, we went diving for pearls...

... their audience enthralled, instruments quietened, drinking in every word. Erestor saw them so clearly. Daeron's dreaminess, fitting their tales into lyrics; Ivaeron, full of questions; Tinfang Gelion's hands lying still on his harp. Nightingales fluttered around them...

... he opened his eyes to sunlight sparkling on the Bruinen.

"Ask your father," he said. "He heard Maglor's songs about that world's end."

Written for the tolkien_weekly prompt 'Loving Companionship'. Sauron's "black thoughts" at Tol-in-Gaurhoth.

In a bubble of blood, she gasped out his name, and died. Such fragile beasts. She was ruined, though, her skin shredded and her bones broken, so I didn't keep the body. It went to the wolves.

I sang a phantom for him. A weary phantom, worn and weeping, haunting the home he'd left for Barahir's war.

So I caught him. So I caught Barahir, his lord. So I shall catch the girl who now stands singing upon my bridge: the Maia's daughter, come looking for her Eilinel.

The stone was still scarred, scratches pale against the grey where gems had been prised from their settings and disappeared into some looter’s pocket long ago. Master Elrond had apologised and Glorfindel had shrugged and said no one could come unchanged from Valinor to Imladris by way of Gondolin’s ruins. Why should a doorstop be any different? Let it bear the wounds of dangerous ages.

All the same, he remembered it pristine, his father etching the golden flowers now touched up with mithril by Elrond’s jewelsmith. And finding, once, those stolen jewels glittering white and red on Alqualondë’s gem-strewn beaches.

Aredhel’s hair had been dark, of course. She had been very fair, though, and the grey of her eyes had been almost blue in the clear, cool light of a mountain morning. Amid the dawn-silvered towers and snow-white streets, the echoes of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel’s laughter had trailed in ribbons of unfurling sound, her feet light on the blossoms shed by lantern-hung trees.

She had given her lightness to her cousin’s blue-eyed daughter. Glorfindel had never heard Galadriel laugh.

“Did you ever meet my father, before?” said Celebrían merrily. “My mother still says she fell in love with his smile.”

He was quiet, their guest, and solitary, and otherworldliness clung to him like a spider’s web of shadows, his past drifting dark behind the brilliance of his blazing eyes. Sometimes he flamed with all the light and youth of the Exile new-come from Valinor he had once been. But Celebrían saw him more often caught in reverie, or from afar heard archaic melodies drawn wistfully from Erestor’s nightingale harp.

“Crossing the Helcaraxë with Galadriel,” he said. “And Elrond’s father, as a child. Odd, to see the two of you now...”

He avoided talking about Gondolin, when he could. They asked him about it, sometimes, and sometimes he answered them; but mostly they realised he did so reluctantly. After a while, the questions ceased.

Night after night, he flew back to Gondolin on silver wings. The nightingale harp sang sweetest by starlight, carrying him home to the white towers and the brilliance of the city he had made.

“Sometimes I think the Queen left it to hearten us,” Erestor had said, “though it was Daeron’s gift. All of us, I mean, who stayed in Middle-earth. She was –” a hesitation “– very wise...”

Candlelight swam in the brandy, a glimmer of gold in gold. Glorfindel’s past was refracted through the prism of the glass. He was saying, “You should have seen it,” and seeing it again as he spoke. “The towers – white towers and fountains – and singing under starlight – when the city was done, when we’d built our bright future, when we were safe –”

Memory blazed about him. He sprawled amid nightingale cushions, enrapt. Brandy: it loosened the heart as well as the tongue. Glorfindel liked it better than miruvor.

Deep in a dark circle flashed golden hair, bright by lantern light. “The Noldorin lady Galadriel,” murmured Daeron, “describing the Helcaraxë, no doubt.”

The lady’s glance turned frosty as they passed by. “Oh, is she?” said Erestor, innocence personified. “Really?”

“Long enough,” said Melinna. “They should have made socks and winter mittens. Even Men know how. ‘Needle-binding’, they call it. But they don’t know about knitting in Valinor. Apparently.”

Erestor grinned. “I don’t think she appreciated the suggestion that she might have stayed there.”

Heaps of marble rubble and ruined fountains littered Thingol’s hall. The gold was gone, along with all the silver nightingales, and murky water spilling from broken basins and choked-up pools flooded the treacherous floor. Scars marred the petrified beeches of this subterranean forest, where once jewelled blossoms had glowed and polished creatures clambered between stone boughs.

Melinna sat down on a felled pillar. “They might have mended the tapestries,” she said, after a moment. “Stitching’s easy.”

“We were occupied,” said the lady Galadriel from the doorway, “stitching wounds.”

The Esgalduin was thick with ice and bloated corpses. He saw the white distended faces of dead friends and closed his eyes against them, thrusting both tunics deep among the reeds. Air bubbled icily up round his arms. He soaked and scrubbed and wrung the cloth until his hands were numb and returned still splotched with blood.

“I thought,” he said. “I thought – but ‘double-dipped in dark heart’s blood’, as Daeron said of Denethor’s standard, and little enough mine...”

No, not like that... pinch the thread... keep the spindle turning! Look, it’s unwinding – not again...

Their voices fluttered around her: all those women who had wanted to take the wild girl from the mountains in hand. She remembered her spindle spinning away under her chair and the broken lumpy thread tangling into impossible knots. Then the Queen had laughed and said Melinna would learn the gentle arts elsewhere, if she learned them at all, which suited Melinna just fine.

Those women were mostly long dead. “Keep it turning,” said a girl from Ost-in-Edhil. “Like this.”

It was fair and stately, this Imladrin guestroom. It had an easterly window to catch the dawn and wild roses brushing pink petals curiously against the glass. There was a pitcher of cool water, a veined marble basin, a broad bed spread with a silken counterpane – and cushions alive with silver nightingales, so that Galadriel remembered Queen Melian’s grey-winged chorus and was without words.

“I wanted to weave a tapestry, but they told me to start with something smaller. I practised on cushion-covers. That’s why Imladris is full of nightingales.”

There were gardens silver-lit by starlight, the flowers shimmering shades of grey; there were nightingales flitting under the archways of heavy-crowned trees and flocking around a white-armed woman alight in the shadows with Aman’s brightness. Gold patterns picked out her embroidered gown and she was smiling, just a little. Her starlit eyes gazed from the tapestry as though reflected from a mirror.

Galadriel looked away. “I would have thought it the Queen’s handiwork, had you not woven her into it.”

“It was,” said Melinna. “She wove Lórien’s gardens for us once. I thought she might walk in those gardens now.”

Later, many ages later, he held again the stone he’d etched with golden flowers so long ago. It was marred now: there were still red jewels and white ones glittering, but few of them had come from that beach at Alqualondë. He turned it over carefully in his hands. Here was one: the gleam was unmistakable. Someone had repaired the flowers with a metal that was not silver, for all its silver sheen.

Warping Arda by Clodia