Hope Against the Shadow by

Hope Against the Shadow

Read Hope Against the Shadow

It is early spring in Imladris. The nights are cool with the last remnants of winter's bite; the days are warm in the sun, and pale leaves are beginning to unfurl in the trees as crocuses and niphredil peep up through last year's leaves, splashes of white and pale purple, sweet-smelling heralds of the season to come. Snow melt has swelled the streams and the river, and the sound of flowing water fills the whole of the valley, and is carried in on a brisk breeze when Arwen opens the windows of her workroom.

She has woken before dawn; the stars still shine overhead, though the sky behind the mountains is growing pale. Arwen gazes up at the familiar shine of the Valacirca and breathes deep. Her dreams have been troubled, lately—of encroaching shadows and the fading of all that is green and good and lovely in the world. And so as she always does when such visions come to haunt her nights, she takes up her work. She loses herself in the whirl of the spindle, and in the gentle clack of her loom. When the sun rises and spills golden light into the room she takes up the gems that the dwarves brought to her, a small chest of glittering white, and she sorts them into smaller boxes by size and by shape, taking satisfaction in the tinkling sounds of each gem falling against the others.

The workroom once belonged to her mother. Arwen has changed very little about it in the long years since, except for the gradual and inevitable exchange of her own projects for the ones Celebrían left undone. She wonders, sometimes, what her mother would think of the piles of black thread that take up the baskets by the loom, or the skeins of silver and mithril threads that Arwen has been slowly collecting over several years. Celebrían had always loved bright colors and almost never worked with black.

Arwen likes it. She likes the brilliance of the silver against the darkness, like stars against the night sky. Like hope against the Shadow.

It is Lúthien that everyone speaks of when they compare Arwen to her ancestors, but it is to Eärendil, her grandfather, her namesake, that she feels closest, these days. She does not know if he can see through her windows when she flings them open to the gloaming, but she shows him her sketches and plans and the half-done embroidery anyway. She knows he cannot hear her, but she speaks to him anyway.

When the banner is done, and carefully folded away until its time comes, Arwen turns her hands and mind to other, smaller work. A cloak, with roses and peonies embroidered along the edges; gloves of soft leather with elanor stitched along the fingers; a forest embroidered onto the hem of a pale blue tunic.

It must be lonely, sailing the heavens. Arwen makes other gifts, too, for the kin across the Sea that she will never meet, but the gifts for Eärendil she makes with special care and sings as she stitches, chasing away her dark dreams with thoughts of bright summer flowers and warm evenings in the Hall of Fire, hoping to catch some of it in each knot of thread, that Eärendil might someday carry a little bit of Rivendell with him into the skies.