Midwinter

A Darkened Sky

She had always thought of it as white.

When she had been a child, it had seemed like magic – a blanket of soft feathers floating from a silver sky to conceal the everyday world.  She had watched it eagerly through the wide windows and sheltered archways and soaked her slippers dancing in it, turning her face to it as it fell to try to catch the crystal flakes on her tongue.

She had never imagined it could hurt.  She had never imagined it piled high until its weight turned it into sharp-edged shards as sharp as blades: hard as rock tumbled to catch the unwary.  She had never pictured it cut into crevasses hidden by the jagged shadows of the starlit snowfields.  She had never thought that it could kill.

Death came with fire and glinting swords and the desperate eyes of elves confronting elves.  Death was hot and breathless and urgent – stained red with spilled blood, blackened with soot, bright with mocking flame.

Here it came silently, leaching life from those who let it, turning skin as white as itself and drawing out all warmth until the smoke-grey eyes closed and let the ice have its way – stealing children from their parents and robbing a people already robbed of home and hope and honour.

Artanis wrapped her cloak protectively around Idril, tucking up her feet until the child was barely visible under the enveloping folds.  She would not let this child be lost.  Elenwë was gone; her despair too great to enable her fight the bone-breaking cold, but this little one, at least, would be saved from the wreckage. 

She trudged behind her cousins: Turgon between his brother and sister, too lost to seek his own path.  Their cloaks disappeared in the spiteful whirl of steely pellets that bit into their numbed flesh.

She could not believe she had thought of it as white.

***

Vision

She could not believe they thought of it as white. 

It was a matter of perception, she thought.  Starlight broke into rainbows of colour as it caught the crystals, making it a wonder of vividness in a world that gleamed in subtle tones. 

It made her want to leave the prosaic solidity of stone behind her and dance, as her daughter did, in the glades open to the sky – spinning above the surface of the pristine crust, spreading herself upon the air, once more free and unencumbered by this prison of flesh.

But she could not.  She would not.  She had bound herself to him: this elf whose eyes shone with the light of the Trees, who trapped the starlight in his silver hair, whose touch had brought her to earth.  He was her love, for whom any sacrifice was worthwhile.  For him, she would forsake the freedom of the wind and waters.

Once she had floated like the drifting flakes, moving as the breeze took her, but now she had settled, like the snow seeking sheltered hollows and she would nestle there as long as he shielded her.

Yet, as the snow was more than it seemed, so, too, was she.  Serene and beautiful: hair like the shadows of night, skin of alabaster, with the inherent, unsuspected power to change the land they knew and make it other, but gentle, soft: thought of as kind. 

Elu knew differently, she thought.  He knew the flaw in her, the difference, the extent to which her reality was unreal – knew how he held her here in this land of dreams.  Without him, her light would shatter into a million rainbows and blow westwards with no more solidity than snow in summer.

She admired the prismatic lustre of the deceptively smooth surface spread before the walls of Menegroth.

She could not believe they thought of it as white.

***

Surviving the Freeze

She did not know how they would make it through all the white.

It was folly to keep trying to move in the depths of winter – but what could she do?  It was stay and die, or move – and probably die.  They could no longer stay where they were, even if the elves had saved them once.  They had lost too much.  Her father was dead, and her brother, and it was up to her to seek safety.  Estolad had been – all very well, but she had known that it was not right for them, whatever the men had said.

The wind howled down the mountains with the voices of Morgoth’s monsters, but it did not chill her.  It could not, she thought with contempt.  She was beyond fear now.  And at least it scoured clear the path before them, so that no-one had any excuse to fall.  There were woods ahead where they could take shelter until the snow passed.

Haleth drew a deep breath.  It was clean and cold - but it was better than rain.  Rain would have soaked into their tight-woven wool and stiffened their leather, chilling them beyond the power of their small fires to warm.  As long as they could see where they were going, this weather would be a help.  And the snow would cover their passing as it blew into drifts across their path.

It made her eyes swim, though, and her head ached.  There were times when the responsibility seemed too much – but who else would do it?  Who else would guard those whom her father had brought together?

The snow stung her face and made her concentrate.

They needed shelter.  They needed shelter and they needed it now – before they were too weak to be able to make a proper camp.

She did not know if they would all make it through all this white.

***   

Playing with Ada

She could not believe there could be so much white.

She stood stock-still, her silver-grey eyes wide with amazement, like a figure carved out of the snow.   Slowly she stretched her hands out to catch the falling flakes.   The world had changed – and she had no reason to believe that it would ever be as it had been.

And they tickled.  They brushed her cheeks like Ada’s fingers – and, like his fingers, were never there when she turned to look.

She stretched out a tentative toe and drew a circle.  It sat in front of her, looking back like a curious eye. She crouched down and placed her palms down on the snow, snatching them back as her fingers sank into the soft blanket.

A snowball landed in front of her and she jerked back to tumble on the ground.  She laughed and grabbed a handful of the cold powder and aimed it at her ada.  Celeborn shook his head like a dog and growled in mock complaint, making her giggle furiously.

He reached out and gently lifted his daughter to her feet, helping her form a perfect ball of pure white snow.  Together they built up a circular shape about the same height as Celebrían herself and then sought further afield to make another that Celeborn lifted up to place on top of the first.  He tilted his head to observe the creation and used his fingers to comb in a more elven hairstyle and shape the ears.

The little elleth jumped up and down, squealing with excitement.  ‘Naneth,’ she cried enthusiastically.

Her ada raised an eyebrow at their sculpture.  ‘I feel she would not be flattered,’ he smiled.  ‘Come now, little one, it is time to go indoors.’

Celebrían rested her head on Ada’s shoulder and peered back into the cold garden.  She still could not believe there could be so much white.

 ***

Tucked In

She had never thought that she would relish the sight of so much white.

It concealed the scars that marred the forest and drove away the shadow.  It was as if Yavanna had tucked away her child in a great bed of white quilts and sung away the bad dreams that made him restless.

She marvelled at the power contained in its apparent softness.  Its touch was as delicate as the brush of a bird’s wing, and yet it covered all relentlessly: a great silent force that pressed down on the frozen earth and buried beneath it all traces of the world she knew, heaping up in unconsidered corners and softening the angles of the supporting trees.

The creatures of the forest had taken refuge, huddling away in their dens and dreys, tucking themselves into sheltered corners to outwait this seasonal visitor – but she could not say the same of the elves.

After the first awed silence at a world remade, the elflings had taken to their heels in their urgent need to be the first to make their mark on the smooth whiteness.  Snowballs had flown; chilled fingers had dug busily to excavate holes; lopsided snow figures had been constructed and the area before the Stronghold had taken on the look of a bloodless battlefield.

But the snowfall had started again.  Great, lazy flakes of perfect hexagons tangled together into short-lived feathers of crystal drifting downwards and the wreckage had disappeared beneath its mantle like a cygnet taking refuge under its parent’s sleek wing.

At first glance, it was without colour, without form – but it was really a mass of shadows and angles, intensified by the deep green of the pines, highlighted by the angular streaks of the trunks in greyish-brown, sparkling in the light of stars now peering down from a midnight sky.

She thought now it was wrong to call it white. 

 ***

Wolf Winter

She would never have believed, had any told her, that the world could turn white.

Never have believed that the soft curve of the green hills could disappear beneath a frozen cloak of white that burned your feet until you wrapped them in salve-smeared rags.  Never have believed that the river could turn to stone.  Never have believed that yellow-eyed monsters could use it as a road to pick off the unsuspecting.

But it was true.

This was no winter snowfall for children to play in while their elders heated spiced cider and baked potatoes in the embers of bonfires.  This was no romp with a tea-tray on the hillside.  This was no laughter-filled sleigh ride to bring home holly and mistletoe.  This was grim survival.

The pellets of ice scoured her, like salt scrubbing a pot, and she pulled her shawl closer round her.  She had to see to the animals – eke out what little food remained and take one out the back, where she could butcher it out of the sight of the others.  She clutched the knife tighter in her hand.  She had to do it.  The little ones needed the food – and, if she held off in hope that their father would come back, it would not only be the children who would starve.  Death would be a kindness.

She paused and stared blankly out over the unfamiliar fields.  This white was an absence of life, she thought.  A spotlessness that wiped clean the world of all that polluted it, that ate at those who endured it like a great hunger and would not be satisfied until it was able to cover them, too, in its shroud.

Her jaw tightened.  They would survive.  She would see to it.

But she would dye every scrap of fabric in her house the brightest colours she could make.  Never again would she wear white.

 ***

The Courts of Kings

She had not known that she had missed white.

Here in the south colour blazed in scarlet and purple against pale stone; tumbling vines drooped flowers in sulphur yellow and stiff stems presented blooms of blazing orange, but she had almost forgotten the simple beauty of a world clothed in pristine white.

She could not wait to shed the heavy formal gown, dispense with the attendants who wished to cater to every whim except her desire to be alone and fling wide the doors that guarded the overheated rooms.

It was not the same.  Here snow was a wonder, rare and transient, not the drifting crystals of powdery perfection she knew from close on three thousand winters, but…  She lifted her face to feel the delicate touch of feathery flakes landing on her cheeks, melting and sliding over porcelain skin.

She danced.  Easily, lightly, transported by the cold air and the enchantment of the drifting snow.  Her bare feet scarcely touched the unexpected blanket and the swirling thistledown moved around her as if it was joining in her display.

‘I am told that the Queen has gone mad,’ Aragorn said gravely. 

She laughed dizzily and span, her midnight-dark hair spread out like silk and her skirt held high, exposing what Gondor would consider to be far too much leg.

‘But I see an elf who has been too long confined,’ he added.

She took his hand and subsided, laughing, before snatching up a handful of the wet snow and throwing it at him. 

‘It is not your fault,’ she said.  ‘None yet hold you responsible for the weather.’

‘We will visit the North Kingdom,’ he promised.  ‘And spend a winter there.’  He looked at her appreciatively.  ‘You can dance in the snow as much as you like.’

Arwen touched his cheek with her cold hand.

She missed white winters, but some things were more important.