Changing Lights by Elleth

Changing Lights

Changing Lights

I

The ring is golden, reflecting the warm light through the large westward bedroom windows. They lie in bed with their feet on the pillows, and bask in it, in comfortable breathless silence (his arm draped across her hips and her back to his chest), and the room smells of them both and of new things. It is exciting, the new house, with its new furniture and new rooms, and she finds herself looking forward to falling asleep and waking and rising and him still beside her, or else hearing the sound of hammerfalls from the forge. She laughs softly at a thought, silly and girlish, of walking there unclothed, standing in the door as if by chance and distracting her young husband from his work, and wonders if she should act on it. She could. It is their house, and there are no parents, siblings, apprentices, servants they would have to avoid. She could.

She yawns and smiles, nodding her head and pressing closer to him.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

II

The ring is golden, reflecting the glow of the lamps around the bed. The room smells of blood and sweat and fluids, and she screams and curses him and feels the bones in his hand as she pushes. He has refused to leave and she can feel the midwife's disapproving eyes on him and wants to tell her to stop glaring. Once the pain is gone. Once the child is born.

She holds him in her arms not long after, exhausted and near sleep like the perfect little redhead between them, and knows she will go through it again. This little one will have brothers and sisters. When he is a little older. When they have seen him grow and make first words and steps and things they cannot even imagine now.

She will. Tomorrow.

III

The ring is golden, reflecting the early light through the open windows. She is sitting up in bed with a cup of dark, strong tea to her lips while twofold hammerfalls from the forge ring in the day. Somewhere in the house the sound of music is rudely interrupted and replaced by a quarrel, there is the slamming of a door and then the wailing of two small, identical voices. She sighs. The room smells of their children and of them, and the wood-and-glue fragrance of new furniture is faded to a whiff that only grows stronger when she carves a little crescent mark into the bedside table with her fingernail.

The sounds of their children fade away; she sets the tea aside and closes her eyes. She tires easily now and dares not think of how she had been warned that six were too much, might exhaust her to the point of refusing return. Now there are seven, and her Days of Children are nearly over although she is barely beyond her hundred-and-fiftieth year. At this age her mother had only just given birth to her firstborn. But her Days of Children cannot be not over as long as someone is missing from their family; the daughter who has become the subject of their talk every evening before sleep.

Perhaps, although she is tired, tomorrow, and then she can rest.

IV

The ring is golden, reflecting the beginning of Telperion's hours. The metal band around her finger looks rather more silvery-cold, she thinks, and the room smells of cold ashes and brackish-salty like tears. The curtains are drawn wide, and across the plain she can see the caravan of horses and a wagon on the road snaking northward. The slam of the door still reverbrates in her ears; there has been much of it these past years, that and shattering glass or earthenware, but none of them sounded so final.

She lies down on the bed and turns her face from the window. She only added another crescent mark the day before, but the smell would not come, and somehow that had made her so uneasy that sleep eluded her that night. The bed beside her was empty anyway; he had long since built himself a nest of blankets and pillows in the forge, and sometimes in the darker hours she would catch a stray glimpse of light shooting through the shuttered forge windows.

She deserves better than that. Why stay in an empty house? She could as well return to her family.

Tomorrow.

V

The ring is golden, and sometimes an errant beam from the lantern in her hand catches the metal. Other than that, it is only a sliver of something dark and polished around her finger as she walks. She used to come back to the old house every few months, to clean away the dust on the shelves and the leaves that have scattered along the garden paths and between her statues. Among the death and darkness and oaths, and the fact that she only recently received a dream, and a messenger from Mandos afterwards, she has not been here in years. Grief takes her own time, and Aulë's great work could not be neglected even though it left her and her father's pale skin burned.

It is as she thought; the garden is overgrown and leaves rustle in thick layers beneath her feet as she walks; within the house her dress drags along a ball of dust that grows greater with each step. She hesitates before the closed door upstairs, and extinguishes the lamp, pushing inward. She won't need it any longer, here she can find her way without any senses, to the curtains, drawing them aside. It cannot be long now; there is a shimmer to the West already, and then, slowly, silvery light floods the land, reaches the window, crawls inside. From faraway she can hear music on the wind, and suddenly - a crescent behind Ezellohar, and that brings it all back; the smell of new furniture and them and blood and children and tea and cold ashes and tears tumbled together in a rush as she stands blinking, waking as the crescent of light grows into a disk in the sky, and she has all the yesterdays she could wish for.

What remains - tomorrow.

Chapter End Notes

It seems like something of a continuity is establishing itself in my head by now. The mention of the 'a dream, and a messenger from Mandos afterwards' hearkens back to my ficlet 'Ghost' in the 'Embers' series. 

Since this raised a question with one of my beta-readers, the reason for Nerdanel and Mahtan being burned would be that they - as Aulendili and skilled craftsmen in their own rights - would be called to assist with the making of sun and moon. In Elleth!Canon, anyway.