Fellow Sailors

For Six Sentence Sunday, albeit slightly belated, here are a bit more than six sentences of something I originally started for tolkienekphrasisweek - my first attempt at a reembodied Maedhros. (I thought it woulld be a short little ficlet...it got away from me.)

"At last the lady Vairë came to me, and asked me, if I would not leave the Halls, still to accept the gift of embodiment, and to come and work under her direction. 'For,' she said, 'it is not in the thought of the One, nor is it the wish of His servants, that anything should be wasted.' And so I acquiesced, and was embodied, but dwelt still in the halls of the Weaver as the living among the dead. And I worked, and I saw that the work of my hands was fair - that my hands, whatever else I had done with them, might still be turned to fair work."

Indeed, his hands were moving on the loom even as he spoke, threading wisps of cloud across a pale blue sky.

But why, I almost asked - and though I bit my tongue, perhaps he perceived the question in my face, or else his thoughts ran this way already.

"I know not why she came to me," he answered my unspoken question. "It was not for what craft was in me, for though I learned to weave in my youth, and liked it well, I did not then come to mastery - and in Beleriand my hand never touched the loom. Perhaps it was for love of Fíriel, her cherished handmaid, though she herself had never known me. What is certain is that it was not because I deserved mercy. I did not. I have never deserved any of their mercies, but they have been merciful to me regardless. Merciful beyond telling."

I could think of nothing more to say to that. His hands, the fair and the marred, kept moving smoothly on the loom, passing the bobbins in and out, in and out.