Summary: The Doomsman of the Valar sees many things. Elwing's life is one of them.
Warnings: Features the kinslayings of Doriath and Sirion, so involves (hopefully implicit) mentions of death and violence.
A/N: For the Mandos challenge at SWG's B2MeM 2010, a character and near-death experiences.

Thank you, Lyra, for the MEFA Nomination!



Unravelling

The first time I notice you, the tapestries branch into a bare forest choked in snow and spattered in red. Dead leaves lie churned up by heavy boots, and dead bodies are crushed into the no-longer-pristine scenery. Life sleeps below all this, and the threads of the tapestries even display what is invisible to the naked eye, such as fëar and other matters below the surface of the apparent world. Densely-woven, none of them miss their appointed courses. Most diligent of all, the threads that comprise the Children are wrought, they sit most loosely in the material and most are stringent in their making, for though there is an appointed course for all, they possess that treasured free will that may alter a weaving completely at any future moment. Not even the dead ones are at rest, some spinning away out of Menegroth as they are coaxed westward, some drawn to ancient trees, wells, and the hidden places of the wood. Vaire's weavers are deft with their fine fingers, many of the faces I can recognize as their former bearers cluster and crowd around me in the dark of my halls and form a new picture of their own, much like the myriad reflecting mirrors that pretend a notion of infinity. The Doomsman's halls are not exempt from fate.

But here – as my hands wander, cull, caress, comfort and beckon those whose time for departure has arrived – here they come upon a silver thread that is nearly snapped, precariously dangling by a fraction of its former strength, by a chance, a stray glance, an accidental look to the ground and the recognition of the tip of a child's boot behind the wall hanging that covers your hiding place, and with some ill-luck you will be tumbling away on your forebearers' path, into that single great white light which they say is always at the back of the mind of mortals to guide them, but that they can all too willingly eclipse. At first I wonder about you, a mortal child in Menegroth, and yet not, but then the mystery solves itself. Lúthien's granddaughter, the threads spell in their colours and materials and the way they are spun. Of course.

So, little Elwing. You know they will murder you, not for your white light, but for that little light stuffed away into your pocket. And I know you are already breathing hard, and your knees barely carry you, a little hand covers your mouth to bite down on and keep from crying. Your picture quivers under my fingers like a frightened bird. But do not fear me, in addition to the fear you already suffer. I may not intercept and mean no harm, mean nothing. I am only a watcher.

Are you about to take flight, little Elwing? Tumble away on that path no Elda can follow you, tear your thread from the tapestry and pass by the torch-lined road that winds to my domain? Your mother is here already, casting around wildly in the hysteria of those that do not yet understand their death. She need only look on the tapestries to see you instead of jabbering and flailing, but she will either see you continue, or see you depart. If I were allowed pity, I might pity her, and pity you. If I were allowed pity, none of this tapestry would run out as it does.

You slip at last and fall out into the open, and a soldier's eyes light on you. They know who you are, little Elwing, and your little heart is pumping away more valiantly than your unravelling fraction of a thread lets on. But it will soon be still. I watch you hoisted up, a pale girlchild, with eyes too large and hair too dark, indeed, you remind me of a fledgeling bird. But your hand remains stuffed into your pocket even as the soldier pitches forward. If I were allowed to think, much less say, this, for the observation of the history of Arda demands impartiality, I would say this to the change: Good.

And indeed, that soldier's thread wings away to me a moment later. He arrives wild-eyed and triumphant and ignorant, still thinking that your little body in his arms will serve as a bargaining chip with your parents whose bodies lie in the throne hall with their slayers, who are also here, and are already seeking to find their father, who sits in solitude and even now mourns all this as his doing, indeed failing to recognize that he was guilty only for a portion of the tale and the rest is not his directly. It is the first step of healing he resists, and that makes even the reunion a thing devoid of joy. He a is would-be puppeteer much like his mother in this, she who would not return and has re-embraced her skills as self-castigation in weaving the history of the world as one of Vairë's maidens.

Back in the forest, you are still in the arms of the soldier, who fell dead with an arrow to his heart, and your head cracks on the marble floor. So it is that your would-be rescuer is nearly your killer, for the quivering of the thread goes still. And yet, when I had expected it to snap and wing from this world, it remains, and you are borne away by your silver-haired kinsman, with the white light on your mind, but nowhere closer.

When you wake, you remember none of your hurt and travails. Doriath is on your mind as an indistinct shadow that lurks below the surface in the tremor of your threads and never emerges in waking, but as the occasional nightmare in which you are whisked away beyond returning, but those are my brother's domain and I shall not presume to intrude too far.

In the end it is the Silmaril's light that saved you, little Elwing. Among all the happenings of the world I watch occasionally as your thread spins away and grows stronger as you, too, grow in pride and folly as you wear the jewel openly. Yet that almost-torn weakness remains. You are young yet, and your advisors allow that indulgence, forgetting they are meant to protect you from the same folly your parents committed, but the few objections are silenced by your beauty and the good fortune of the Havens of Sirion. It is, some say, nearly Aman come again, and indeed the threads that issue from your house run with the glow of the mingled light, beautiful and majestic. Even here in my halls, some dead cluster to watch its radiance.

Little do they know what fate is spinning away, little do they know what hinges on that almost-broken thread. Not the arrival of the sad remnants of Gondolin, not the half-elven boychild who is as mortal as you, and with whom you entangle yourself hopelessly, snare and knot and tie yourself to him only to diverge again in a matter of years when he goes out sailing for the first time. His thread thrums blue with sea-longing ever after. Yours longs for him as you wed and yet know he will leave again – and he is mortal, and the waters are treacherous in a way that even I cannot fully read, and you fear is justified. But he returns and you grow heavy with sons, and sit by the tower windows waiting, but that is not the object of my attention. I view the little lives that coil in your womb, and as I follow them through the ages only one of two runs with the same white light as yours.

And yet it is the barely-knit weakness in your past that interests me most. It will tear someday, little Elwing. Borrowed time, I would say, if any such concept as linear time mattered. Linearity is an invention of your people and contradicted in more ways than one, if you ever were to look through my eyes. But if it leaves you with the idea of safety, that is no matter.

The years spin away into a night of mist and driving snow when the first message comes. Your quill spells out refusal on that very piece of parchment, and the threads form a pattern for all to see, message and warning and refusal, message and warning and refusal, message and warning and refusal. Little Elwing, is this worth it? Is the jewel worth it, the one that you clutch in your hand and that causes your fingers to shine with their living blood?

In my hall, the watchers quail and turn away from the red threads that slash across the pictures. Have they been hoping this story would weave into a different end, that indeed there was pity to be had? Whom were I to pity, then, little Elwing and her blood-red hands and bird-like tremble? The figures outside her gate,with torches and swords, the jewel, her sons? All of them, perhaps. But pity is not within my permission. Let Nienna weep for them.

So, little Elwing. Remembrance comes at last and you know they will murder you for that little light in your hands. Your heartbeat threatens to falter, your knees threaten to fail, and yet you bid your people defend themselves or flee, not knowing how many strings and threads they are trailing to be cut. Your sons are taken to what you imagine as safety, your husband is far out at sea and the Vingilot will not reach the Havens in time. The first of your people are arriving here in my halls.

Your door gives way in a shower of splinters as the two remaining brothers enter the tower room, and you are awaiting them in fear; your wide bird-eyes meet theirs in a final gesture of refusal before you step and tumble and take your thread into the rolling, coiling, foaming sea below, onto the hard surface of the water and the sharp rocks beneath.

The foam erupts into white light and the sound of the Ulumúri. The thread that nearly broke in Doriath is snapped, unravels, slips and floats gently to the floor of my hall, dangling a loose end, and all your silver, white, blue, red, the blood and the trembles and the bird-like eyes are obliterated and given new shape – a petrel, a seabird, a white-winged gem - and you wing away in a frenzy, out of mortal death and past my domain, uplifted, with the jewel, into the West, and to fate untold before one day soon I shall give you a choice that is not one, no longer. You tasted your would-be-fate now, and found it all too easy to eclipse in fear and frenzy.

But when we will meet, do not fear me. I am only a watcher.

End Notes

The inspirations for this fic are many and various, and the outcome was quite unexpected, especially with regards to the prompt, but I hope it won't be considered completely off the mark.

The threads that are being spoken of so frequently have been on my mind ever since I read Le Chat Noir's poem Tapestries, and in connection with a documentary on a mode of recording in the Incan Empire, so-called Khipus, it all wove (if you will pardon the pun) into something resembling a story, and this is what came out.

Regarding Elwing's and Eärendil's mortality vs. immortality, I've heard that differing interpretations exist in fandom, but after thinking this through and discussing it with my lovely betas, I've come to the conclusion to leave it in the story as my personal interpretation of canon (and most reviewers seem to be agreeing that mortality is the 'default mode' for the half-elven unless special circumstances allow them to renounce it in favour of Eldarin mortality).

As for whether Elros and Elrond were twins depends on your acceptance of HoMe canon, a footnote in The Lost Road (HoMe V) mentions this as fact while the published Silmarillion (and Tolkien's other material) make no mention of it.

A petrel, a sea-bird, a white-winged gem is a fragment of Tolkien's own poetry, (fittingly) The Bidding of the Minstrel and originally a reference to Vingilot.

The white light at the back of Elwing's mind is from Louis McNiece's Prayer Before Birth.

And once more, last but not least, I'll have to thank my betas Lyra (also for the help in finding a title!), SWE and Cirdan for their hard work and constructive criticism. I'd be lost without you. Thank you!