35. Tapestries

They hung on the walls, the endless corridors full of them. Some of them were faded, the colours dull and dusty, but at a closer look, their beauty was visible, and the scenes they depicted were astonishing, just as their rendering. The weaving style was like nothing he has ever seen before: the individual threads seemed to have a life of their own, the pictures in the tapestries changing as he passed them, the tales unfolding before his eyes. Many of them depicted events he could not place in the history, or events that seemed too ordinary to be recorded by any chronicles:

A woman baking bread, the scent of the golden-brown loaf she was just taking out of the almost real.

A Sindarin artist in the Grey Havens, forming a delicate clay statue, a heated kiln waiting to accept the fragile beauty and harden it while a light rain falls outside.

Somewhere among the sand dunes in Khand, an old Variag man dies, bitten by a snake.

Twin girls herding geese, singing as they walked barefoot on the fresh spring grass.

A sleeping Elven maid, and a warrior donning his armour. He leans above her to give her a kiss before he leaves and closes the door. "We will meet again…" he whispers. And they do - in Mandos.

He stopped by an ancient tapestry - there were two women on it, and he looked at the tapestry, he knew their names, knew what event it depicts. There were two Valier -Yavanna and Nienna in the moment when they stood up from the darkened ground, finally giving up the attempts to revive the dead Trees.

"Their beauty is destroyed forever…" Yavanna sighed.

"Dark times are coming," wept Nienna. "Dark and evil…"

He stepped away, overwhelmed by the feeling of despair from the old tapestry. Shivering, he took a few steps to another one, that seemed to be shining with gold, attracting him with its light and relaxed atmosphere. In the moment he looked at it, he knew whom is it depicting, he knew all threads of fate that led to the scene, he could see in his mind what is going on in the picture – such was the might of Vairë's tapestries. He smiled slightly at the scene: