Work Text:
Galadriel approached the hanging tapestry slowly. It showed a lake, cupped in high mountains, and behind the peaks the light she now knew as the clear winter stars. The lake was partially frozen, layers and layers of ice stitched with impossibly thin thread, shining with pooled starlight reflecting from below. Here and there the ice failed entirely, shattering into bottomless black pools with only the faintest of ripples to sing with the breeze. No trees stood in that high valley, but the wind danced also with the many blades of grass. She could even feel it rustling in the dark heath and curling against the bright tumbled stones.
"Our land is beautiful, is it not?" asked Melian, breaking into her awe.
"Not just the land, but the skill of the artist," Galadriel replied.
Among her mother's people, weaving had been less a less an art and more a necessary skill. Ships needed rope and canvas, sailors warm and weatherproof clothing, and there was always need of nets and bags and woven jugs to carry water. So Galadriel certainly had practice spinning and weaving, but in her adulthood had spent more and more time among her father's people. They understood that a successful piece didn't always mean one wished to create twenty more just like it.
"Alas," Melian said. "For the land is now beyond my reach and yours: I will never lay eyes on it again save in memory. And as for you, even if you could reach the tarn you would find it irrevocably altered by Moon and Sun as I never knew it."
"But if it's the artist you admire, I will teach you what I may." And, Melian privately hoped, the plain physical skill would settle her husband's young kinswoman and begin to draw out the woe that was all too clearly hanging over her.