[art by my partner DarkPassionPlay82 @ deviantART, used with permission]
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In the hush between death and memory,
Míriel sits at her loom in Mandos,
the weft a shimmer of stars,
the warp a trembling of long-forgotten names.
Silver threads glisten like tears never shed,
and her shuttle hums with the sorrow of ages,
each motion a hymn to what was lost—
a mother's fingers unmaking fate to reweave it.
A fire begins somewhere far beyond the walls,
a blaze with no fuel but wrath and brilliance.
She feels it—
the burning scream of Fëanor, her son,
as Gothmog strikes and the flame devours.
Ash spills into her tapestry unbidden.
Smoke coils like serpents through her loom.
She closes her eyes and tastes the cinders on her tongue.
Then light again, sudden and terrible—
a phoenix in the shape of her child,
his wings forged of language never spoken aloud,
his feathers caked in soot and memory.
He does not bow, but hovers
above the tapestry she’s still weaving.
“I will not return,” he says,
“Not till the Dagor Dagorath shakes the bones of the world.”
She does not cry—she never cries—
but her voice is a blade dulled by love.
“The Dagorath is not one war, Fëanáro,
but an echo rebounding through time.”
Her shuttle pierces the threads: lesson, wound, fire, grace.
“I will not summon you—only shape you.
You will know again what it is to forge without ruin.
You will be born again, but not yet.”
The loom halts. Silence.
Then thunder, cold and cracked.
She sees the mortal world again,
storm spiraling into itself like a curse.
Thundersnow falls in whirling wheels,
white as forgotten tombs,
and in a hospital dimmed by the hour,
a child is born breach and blue.
The mother, twelve hours in shadow-cry,
has gone beyond speech and sound.
The umbilical cord, like a noose of fate,
tightens its coil of ancient doom.
Then she is there—Míriel,
a shape of starlight in the sterile room,
invisible to all but the child between here and gone,
her hand a whisper against the child’s soul.
“I have woven threads through fire and silence,”
she murmurs, voice like snowmelt in spring.
“This is not your ending, small bright one.
The Doom rides you, yes, but I bend its edge.”
She knots a blessing in the child’s breath.
“Find your people.
Find your mentor again.
Love each other back into the light.”
The child gasps—blue fading to pink,
a heartbeat flutters into thunderous life.
Snow continues to fall, soft as grace.
The storm outside begins to still.
And far in Mandos,
Míriel returns to her loom,
fingers slick with time,
a phoenix-feather caught in her thread.
Each loop she ties is a question
Fëanor never asked himself.
Each knot, a path he could not walk.
The tapestry shifts—no longer just fire,
but soil and salt and forgiveness.
Beneath her hands, stories bloom,
not of glory, but of enduring,
and of beginning again in strange forms.
Outside of time, the halls echo with breath.
She weaves, and the world turns.
In a distant life, the child grows—
drawn to stars and forge-light,
to languages no one remembers.
And sometimes, when they sleep,
a woman of light sings to them
in the tongue of looms and lost fire.
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