Certain Doom - by Spacellama
Bout two months prior, Gilraen had hauled her boulderish pregnant self up the mountain -- forgetting, coincidentally, to bring a change of stockings, so that she’d had to wash her woolies out every night since then, lest they get sticky and smelly, and which labour, also coincidentally, proved uncommonly difficult when one was unable to bend properly -- in expectation that “elvish medicine” would improve the torment to come. It hadn’t.
She’d just been in another sort of labour for twenty-six hours, without food or water or those blissful tisanes the local midwives brewed back home in Eriador. As far as Gilraen could reckon, “elvish medicine” involved nothing comforting whatsoever, but instead offered ice-cold hinged tweezers for “having a look,” sonorous voices, and some bloke singing off in the other room. No jest, that: singing! Had been a time there, right about in hour twenty-one, when she’d fomented a very pleasant daydream involving tying that dratted elf’s vocal chords into seaman’s knots. Alas, a pain had interrupted her fantasy, and then another frowning elf -- because, of course, they were always frowning and in all other ways attempting to appear otherworldly wise -- had reached below and grabbed an ankle. Not hers. “Push,” he’d said, quite as it if were a new thing. He’d looked at her over the linens with a raised eyebrow, as if he were about to launch into instructions. Well, she’d related right then her fond hope of mangling the singer’s innards -- in blistering language, and leaving no detail unspoken -- and that had, finally and blessedly, chipped a bit at the medicine man’s aplomb.
Nothing had chipped at the torture of the birthing, alas. She’d endured it all, right down to the last bit when her screeching, howling babe had made an entrance into Arda. Done, she’d thought. Done and survived.
Yet now, here was Elrond holding the babe and frowning something fierce. Gilraen fisted her hands in the sheets and ground her teeth: this was resoundingly not what she wanted to see.
“Can you stop muttering and get to the point?” she growled.
Elrond flinched and looked up, over the babe’s black-downed head. Could an elf be startled? Gilraen had never witnessed such a thing before but had a sense she was doing so now.
“Madam,” the elf-lord said, “I do not see how it is possible. You foresaw this child, yes?” Gilraen would have nodded if she’d had a scrap of energy. Instead she grunted in the affirmative. She’d had the gift of knowing, just as her mother had, and her vision for this child involved a crown and the White City and something about leathers. A scabbard, maybe? Regardless, clearly this child was The One, the chieftain who would reclaim the throne in Gondor and lead all of the free peoples of the West forth from the shadow of Mordor and into the Great New Age of ...
“As did I,” Elrond was going on. He clucked in his throat -- yes, like a chicken -- and shook his head. His long finger, the very one with the pretentiously large ring, moved along the babe’s head, comforting. “And yet.”
“And yet?” Gilraen parroted.
“He is a girl,” Elrond said, lingering on that last word like it was a curse.
Gilraen opened her mouth, but Elrond was muttering on again, something about Numenor and Queens and successions and such rot.
Gilraen closed her eyes and felt herself sink back into the bedding. She tried very hard not to grin.
A long while later, she heard new voices from the room just beyond hers, similar voices but definitely two. Low and rushed, and saying something about darkness and shadow and fighting.
“We’re off to close their retreat and -- oh, look, what’s this?” said one. The other cooed a bit, and Gilraen knew that Elrond and his sons were staring at her child, and had no possibility of peeking into her room seeing her at all. She let her mouth ease into a grin.
In Gilraen’s mind, a silver thread of foreknowledge beckoned, and she grasped it, followed it up yet another mountain (was doom always up a mountain, then?). In an unlikely aerie on the mountainside, a maid, young and warm as daisy cups, danced beneath silvered leaves, and two pairs of ageless grey eyes watched her. One set of long fingers braided a crown of white blossoms; another set the flowers in her hair. They danced as three until the day faded into twilight, and then they linked hands, descended the mountain until it gave way to a city of spires and white stone, and with careful fingers the girl replaced her crown of flowers with another of silver wings . A glint of gold flashed through her hair, but disappeared in her sleeve. She moved along a row of guards in black leather until she reached the steps of her throne. Two elves stood beside her as she took her place at the point of history.
Gilraen heard a scuff of feet and knew she was alone again with Elrond and the child.
“Be easy, my lord,” she said, feeling sleep and darkness close. “This child will be the hope you saw, and yes, the doom as well.”