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Two lights gutter on in the nothingness. At first, Caranthir mistakes them for eyes, monster or Maia. Tensing, his body makes itself known, legs wobbly, skin clammy, vision blurry. His breath sounds loud in his head. The experience of the flesh, he recalls, is an undignified one.
Slowly, the world resolves before his eyes: two lampstones, and between them, a door.
“I don’t like it,” Caranthir decides, hearing his voice snatched away by the empty space. “Great Námo, if this be some device of yours, it had better lead away from here.”
Nobody answers, of course. Nobody had answered as he tacked his long course through the waiting place, tumbled back and forward in time by silent storms. It did not match anything he had ever imagined about death. Not so long ago, Maglor used to warn him away from cliffs or stovetops with tales of Mandos and its trials, grown more ridiculous with every telling - worms and weeds and weighted dice, invisible doors and endless queues, shouting as they chased each other, lesson quite abandoned -
Perhaps, he realizes, that was very long ago after all.
And besides, he’s glad nobody will answer. Great Námo made himself less than agreeable, last time they saw each other.
But there stands the door, and a glance behind reveals only a dark that repels the eye. That leaves one option. Caranthir gathers his shapeless sheet of a garment closer about his shoulders - where had that come from? - and walks forward.
The latch squeals as the door swings open, making him flinch. Then he feels warmth drift over the threshold, so unfamiliar after the absent stillness of the air outside. The room is covered on all sides by soft things. Lamplight, papers, bolts of fabric. Tapestries crowding each other on the walls, and yet more waiting beneath in loom-frames. Woven figures as alive and bright as beetles. Soft things everywhere, but there, resting discreetly on the desk, the shears.
And behind the desk, an unknown Elf is sitting, watching him. Her fingers tap together expectantly in her lap.
It must be the lady Vairë herself, he thinks - only she seems so much less than the Powers ever did, so much more made from the world, like he is.
“Moryo,” the stranger says, “come closer. Let me see thee.”
It is old, old Quenya, the accent of the most stubborn Unbegotten from his childhood. As he steps into the lamplight, he thinks of his grandfather Mahtan, of his easy laughter and rough hands, which would always pat Caranthir on the head despite his protests. How long, since he has last touched another person?
“Who sent you?” he asks. “Do I know you?” Then the stranger tilts her head to the side, and her pale hair shifts, and Caranthir’s words stall on a choked “oh.”
Death does not make a body unrecognizable; he knows that. Curvo, splayed on the bright tiles with his bright blood spreading, looked like himself. Haleth’s twin, buried near the trodden river, still shared her nose and brow. Death does not make a body unrecognizable. But life does.
He visited the shell of her twice, in his childhood. They used to keep it nestled in the crook of a hill where poppies grew everywhere, perfect and lifeless like one of his mother’s statues. When he looked close, he saw the faint wind stirring the little hairs on its arms, its neck, but it had no breath of its own. He could not understand such a thing, a person without a person inside, and it frightened him.
Now, living Míriel’s grey eyes play over his face. Her ears twist forward as she smiles at him. “I thought thou mightst recognize me,” she says, levering herself up with a hand on the chair’s arm. She rises slowly, negotiating, like an older Adaneth, but she stands up straight - though shorter than he had expected. “With the others, I had to name myself.”
“Others,” he repeats. “Who?”
Míriel comes toward him, her mantle a shuddering field of detail as she moves. “Findaráto walked this way first, and after him Angaráto his brother, then young Arakáno. Long years passed then, but next came the lady Elenwë with Turukáno close behind, and not too long ago Findekáno as well, at last. Now it seems the moment is thine.”
An old constricting pain in Caranthir’s throat disquiets the new body, and he barely stops his hand from rising there. He lets it come up to press at his face instead. “All those names,” he says. “We all changed them, back over the Sea.”
“I know, Moryo.” Míriel reaches to take his other hand, and he clasps back, feeling her long slim fingers, so like his own. It is not the kind of hand that makes him wonder how things might have turned out differently, but it’s warm.
He takes a deep breath, without much hope. “My brothers,” he begins.
“Only thee,” admits Míriel. Caranthir nods silently - this is not a new problem, anyway. In Beleriand some part of him worked always to stay afloat above the future, the terrible future he had called down upon himself. He slammed doors in his mind or wheedled at them with possibilities, but behind, the certainty remained: they would all fall and fall, out of the world entirely like lanterns drunk down by icy seas. By the end he had stopped treading water.
And here he is now. Here - he is. Míriel leads him to the center of the room, drawing aside a sheet stiched with flowers to reveal an empty stool before the desk. Caranthir’s legs still threaten to wobble as he shuffles over and sits. What else is there to do? Across from him, Míriel arranges herself in her chair again, laying aside her half-finished embroidery to fetch paper and charcoal from the drawers. She lifts her head and cocks it this way and that, studying, measuring (he catches himself searching for his father). “Look at me, dear,” she instructs. “But no need to keep still or fold thy hands like a proper sitter. I would do justice to the living body that is thine again.”
Caranthir nods in thanks, for his new nerves do hum with restless energy, urging him to get up and run like a child through the hills he once knew so well, face turned into the biting wind. He supposes Míriel would understand. Under the yellow light her eyes flick up and down, and the charcoal hushes as her hand makes careful strokes. He looks at the walls and sees gold, green, blue, red, red, red.
In childhood he took up the craft, which was hers before it was anyone else’s. It made people exchange meaningful glances with each other. He had always hated that.
“Turn back to me, if thou wilt,” says Míriel.
“Right.” Then a thought catches him. “You never told me who sent you. Is this an obligation of yours, meeting us here, and will I stay here very long, or - oh, Lights and Leaves, they haven’t got you trapped here, have they?”
Míriel glances up to him with a silent scoff. Ah, there it is, the shear-blade among the wool! “Let them try! No, I came unto Vairë’s House of my own choice. Our people, our family, already taught them that lesson.” She lifts her free hand toward the walls.
“And these are our stories.”
“Yes.”
He can pick out the stories he recognizes, from his own life or from wisps of the outside world caught up and spun into his strange dreams beyond death. The flood of the sea, he knows, and the terrible thing that had happened to Celebrimbor, though he still can’t figure out how his nephew ended up dead and twisted like that. But not all of it is familiar. What is the set of rings for? What happened to the second rescue-hostage twin?
“Where do you learn of them?” he asks.
“I open the window,” says Míriel with a secretive smile, “and I look outside.”
Caranthir feels his mouth drop open, which he hopes she won’t sketch. “You look out there?”
“I do indeed. It is not such chaos anymore, now that I have my body to hold me rooted - so do not make that face at me, Moryo - but neither can I control where the gaze turns. Sometimes the mists part and I find myself watching some furious battle, or festival, or the raising of a tower. Sometimes I simply see one of us eating in their garden in the twilight, alone. I weave it all, for I know not what makes a moment important until suddenly it is so. I refuse to miss any of them.”
It’s guilt, he realizes, that pinches her face so queerly. In all the many tales he was told about Míriel, he heard so much guilt from the outside, cast every-which-way, that he never considered she might feel it herself.
Maybe he never considered that she might feel anything, that silent shape among the poppies, that dangerous name.
Is that what it means to die and become a story?
“I do not fault you for leaving us,” he tells her. “You did what you must.”
“I did what I could. I did what I did. Maybe there is a difference, and maybe not.” The charcoal comes down in heavy, sideways strokes as she fills in his hair. “I never knew thy name, or thy brothers’, or those of dear Indis’s children, until after I returned. I never saw any of you learn to walk and speak and love and quarrel. I never held you. I never knew you untouched by disaster.”
“When did you first see us?”
“Upon the rising of the Sun.”
She points to a tapestry which had drawn Caranthir’s eye from the beginning - one of the brightest of them all. The newborn Sun is the color of doubt burned away. Even the ice looks beautiful, rendered in a green as rich as a jewel.
“Did I tell thee I came here of my own accord?” Míriel says, leaning forward in her seat. “That is but a half-truth, really, for the moment I stood up I felt our tale calling me, demanding my hands. And I needed it as much as it needed me. Much as I regret missing the start of it, this work is not my apology. It is my purpose.”
Watching her, as her eyes come alight with strange hunger, Caranthir sees the ghost again.
“If only you had known him,” he murmurs.
“Known who?”
“My father. Your son. You were… very like him, just then.”
She has set aside charcoal and paper.
“What was he like, to thee?”
Next to the sunrise hangs a series of woven portraits, smaller than the other tapestries, less like palace portraiture than like tokens of the beloved dead. Fingon is there, at the end of the line, with his hair set loose. Finrod is at the beginning. Finwë sits above them all, half-smiling, intimate, unkingly.
Caranthir’s father is not on that wall, but he is everywhere else. He is holding a fistful of light; holding a blade to his brother’s throat; holding his children tight, cheek tucked against his eldest son’s head. The words of his tongue are tugging the very weft of the fabric. The things he made are setting people on fire from the inside out.
She must have modeled his face from someone else’s drawings.
“He was well-named,” Caranthir says finally.
Her flame designs look so bright against that deep green.
They had no dye of that color in Beleriand. In the lands he had loved, he wove in madder-red and lichen-purple, buckthorn-gold and onion-brown. The dwarves of Belegost offered blue woad from inland, but they charged dearly for it, and it took careful skill to make use of. Besides, Caranthir never wore that color. He wore the shades of mountain and forest, and scarlet. It was a place for such colors, wild and terrible, everything he had been promised.
It holds his body and his brothers’, his father’s ashes, the multitudes of Doriath and Sirion, all of them wearing blue now. Yes, he knows what it means to die and become a story.
First, the portraits; next, the sunrise. Then - out of order - the eight figures, circled close in torchlight, speaking, echoing.
Míriel casts her eye to the side, following his gaze. “Ah,” she sighs. “That one - my most troublesome project. Thou must understand, of course, the difficulty of putting such a thing to a solid image. I worked and reworked that draft, and still I find myself dissatisfied. To call forth the madness, love, or fear? To weave some sign of power or leave it be?” She squints at the figures, tracing a finger through the air, then at last turns back with a frustrated huff. “I think I can only ask the maker himself.”
It suprises Caranthir, the way his insides twist at the thought. When he first died, that question tormented him - what his Oath might look like, woven into and about his soul. He pictured chains sometimes, and other times filigree wire, beautifully wrought as anything that came from those hands. His dead mind encountered both; wrestled them, mended them, ate them.
Now, he finds, he no longer cares. Could their choice of metaphor matter, while their solid selves cut the life from people? He had met two who might have answered Míriel’s questions, and little good it did them. One exploded into embers. The other…
Caranthir forces himself to gather breath, and speak.
“Lúthien’s son told me,” he begins, halting, stumbling on - “that he could see it clinging to us. He said he knew exactly what it would make of us, and I do not doubt it. He had a fierce fey spirit about him, like Maedhros did, sometimes, when folk used to say he was no longer wholly Elda. If you must capture his likeness, think of that. Dior was his name. I never saw which one of us killed him. He had - children…” The words burn, but they must come out of him. The whole poisoned well inside must be cracked open to the daylight now.
“I know what became of my brothers. I watched, and part of me ran beside them, at Sirion, at the end of the war. And had I lived I would have done so in full. Every step of the way.”
He wants Míriel’s anger, so he can throw himself into it, or her forgiveness, so he can fight it and win. She gives him neither. On her face is the sad look of someone who has heard the same awful story over and over again.
He can’t bear it.
“Say something!” Caranthir bites out, rising so quickly his new legs nearly fail. “You know I am not meant to be here! We lived knowing that, we fought and died knowing that, and it terrified us - for what is an Elda to make of words like Everlasting Darkness? But this is worse! Do you not see?” He gestures to himself, his face that always stood out too brightly. “I live, and so must the rest of us, and that means that we did it all for nothing. It means our monster had no voice to call the night, until we believed it; no strength to wrestle us, but what we fed it. Why did we not stop feeding it? Why did we never recognize the teeth for our own?”
He stands there, teeth gritted, hands grasping before him at nothing. Through the flicker of the lamps, the great family spills from tapestry to tapestry, trailing blood and gold.
“That is not an answer I can give thee,” says Míriel softly. “Nor can anyone else, I think.”
“I know.” His hands let go of the nothing, and drop to his sides again. “I know. Only say something.”
“They do not arrange these visits so I might ‘say something.’”
“You can’t have merely watched as it happened! Historians always think they can, but they are liars.”
Míriel arches an eyebrow. “Indeed I did not, Moryo. And when my son finally comes back to me, he will see it - he will know my wrath alongside my love. I have so much of both to give him, and though I may not look it after all this time, I am terribly impatient at heart! But for thee, the outside awaits, with wrath and love enough. Hast thou not a mother of thine own?”
His mother. His mother, humming to herself, the light from the window resting upon her as she worked - they used to say Caranthir looked most like her out of any of their family. When he was small and tired at the end of an outing, she would lift him onto her hip, and they would walk home all together. In his dead visions, she held him that way once again. In life, he never turned back to look at her as he charged out of the city; never watched her lose him.
She has no way of knowing one of her lost sons has come back. She must still believe herself alone.
Silently, messily, Caranthir begins to weep. The experience of the flesh is an undignified one. He hasn’t felt such relief in an Age.
“How do you do it, Grandmother?” he asks. “How do you go home?”
Once more Míriel stands and crosses to him, stepping around the stool. This time she takes him into her arms, and he holds on tight.
“Oh, my dear. We remember the way, we walk to the door, and we knock.”
Those words would have sounded empty from anyone else, like the kind of obfuscated advice an Ainu might give. But Míriel knows. Here is one of those few who, like him, knows what it means to die and become a story, and out of all the snarled threads of their past, the knowing ties them together.
“I believe what they tell us is true, in part,” she goes on, “and one may learn, in the place behind us. But we cannot mend without touching.”
“I remember,” Caranthir manages. “I chose this.”
“And that speaks to the strength in thee.”
In the end, it was Haleth who came to him. If all the rest of his houseless life dissolves in daylight, he will keep hold of that last thing. He knew even then that he looked only on a memory - the real woman, her strength, her grief, her laughter, had passed through and beyond so long ago. But her image stood clearly over him, both the old chieftain and the mud-streaked young survivor. She had taken his face in her hands, not gently, dragging him forward to look at her. “Morifinwë Carnistir,” she commanded, “get up!”
And everything made sense to him, in that moment, and the well inside him yearned to breathe air, no matter what it took. So he obeyed.
When he raised himself to his feet, and blinked, he saw nothing at all. Then two lights guttered on.
Drawing back now, Caranthir rubs at his eyes. “I suppose I must do it, then.”
Míriel nods and says, “yes.”
“Does my mother live with her father again, now?”
“She does.”
“I missed that house.” Something laugh-shaped falls out of him. “It was quieter than ours. I can make myself useful there - I need that now. Any touch of the frivolous prince in me is long gone. But maybe the child lives, and loves the meadows there still. Oh, and the sky! I miss the house, but how I miss the sky…”
He closes his eyes and pictures it: moving air, familiar walls. The terribly difficult task of living on seems softer in that light.
Then he grimaces - “Though, in that house, Fingon and Finrod might come over for supper. I will need to speak to them, but I refuse to have supper together just yet! Imagine!”
Once again, Míriel smiles, with her sincerity and her secret sharpness. “Or, if they come to accost thee,” she says, “thou couldst visit me instead. After all, thou art a threadworker too, if memory serves, and for this next piece, I would seek thy counsel.”
She holds up her finished sketch.
There he is. There - he is, wearing no trappings of lordship or even jewelry at his ears, with the Treelight all bled from his eyes. Returned, beyond reason, for better or worse. Looking like his mother, even still.
Alone, but maybe not forever. Maybe not even now.
For already this new life has given him something good and whole: he has never had a sewing companion before.