Threads of Song by StarSpray

Chapter 1

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Lúthien loved to watch her mother at work. Melian's long fingers carefully sorted through the baskets of brightly dyed threads, all bound up in neat skeins, as she hummed to herself a song older than the world. She never sketched out the scenes she wove into her tapestries, or told what they would be before enough was done for the scene to be made out. Her hands moved swiftly over the loom, sometimes so quickly that Lúthien could not follow them.

All of Menegroth's tapestries were made in one great long chamber, a natural cave that had been carefully enlarged and made bright and fair by many lamps given them by the Dwarves. They had also, to the delight of the weavers, crafted several enormous mirrors and lined them up along one wall. In this way the weavers could see what they were creating, though they sat behind the looms. Only Melian did not use it, her eyes almost never flicking up to see her work as she wove.

Lúthien sat in front of the loom with her little spindle, spinning fine wool into rather lumpy thread, watching the images grow up before her eyes. This tapestry was mostly of dark blues, all different shades blended together into something both luminous and dark. It was broken only by bright silver and white threads for stars. Gradually, she realized that the night sky she thought her mother had been weaving was in fact only the wide skirts of a woman, caught mid-twirl as she danced amid clouds of brilliant colors, stars in her hands and falling through her fingers.

"Who is that?" she asked her mother.

Melian looked up, and smiled. "Elbereth," she said, "making the stars. She danced through the heavens and scattered them like seeds in a field."

Lúthien set her spindle aside and ran around to climb onto her mother's lap. It meant abandoning the tapestry, but Melian did not seem to mind. She wrapped her warm arms around Lúthien. "Were you there, Mother?" Lúthien asked. "Tell me about it, please!" Laughing, Melian did, breaking into a song about it, of heat and light and music piercing deep empty darkness, of dancing in Varda's train with her handmaidens, and watching the stars come together to form the constellations they knew in Middle-earth, and rejoicing because they knew that soon, soon the Children would wake, and the first thing they would see would be the splendor of heaven.