b2mem | Before Spring, by Suzelle (Reply)

B2MeM Challenge: “Malbeth the Seer, Ivorwen, hope and prophecy” - zopyrus
Format: Short story
Genre: Gen
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None
Characters: Ivorwen, Dírhael, Malbeth
Summary: In her worst moments of grief, Ivorwen dreams of a seer long gone.

News of Gilraen’s death came just before the spring thaw, from a heavy-hearted Tarcil returning from a winter abroad with the Rangers. Finnael had stayed with her in her last days, he said, a debt Ivorwen could never hope to repay. The two women had settled to the south of the Angle some years before, but Ivorwen was too old to travel, now, and the fact that she could not say her final goodbyes at Círbann was one she would have to accept.

A despair she had never known wracked through her, worse, somehow, than her son’s death over half a century before. Twice now the world had done this to her, torn her children from her while she stood helplessly by. Twice now she would stand before the barrows of the Angle, accepting that there would be no body to bury. Only a white flower in hand with a soft prayer to Mandos, though this time it was less a prayer and more a desperate plea. Give her back. Give her back, and take someone else’s child.

She could not bring herself to sleep at night, for with sleep came dreams, sometimes flashes of foresight, empty promises of hope she no longer believed, but more often she would dream of her daughter. Gilraen as a child, chasing after the barn kittens in the stables, Gilraen’s eyes sparkling as she looked at Arathorn, or Gilraen as she had been these last years, face more careworn than her mother’s, but still capable of laughter if her father told the right jokes. To this day, Ivorwen could not name the moment Gilraen’s despair had overwhelmed her, but she ran over the last few years of her daughter’s life over and over her mind’s eye, demanding to know why she had not done more to comfort her.

“You cannot keep doing this, my love,” Dírhael said to her one night, after he had discovered her sewing at the table long after midnight. His eyes were alight with concern for her, but his face was still hollowed out by grief, the old knife scar along his cheek jutting out in the candlelight, and Ivorwen hated the world a bit more for the damage it had done to her husband. “You will make yourself ill if you do not allow yourself some rest.”

“It is a poor definition of ‘rest,’” Ivorwen replied, attempting to keep her voice from cracking. “I dream of Halbarad, dying for Aragorn in some far-off country, or I dream of her, and I awake more drained than I have ever been before. Why should I lie sleepless in bed, waiting for Lórien to invoke some new torture for me?”

“Your visions have never been set in stone. You do not know if your dreams about Halbarad will come to pass. As for Gilraen…” Dírhael trailed off. “Is it so bad, to see her face?”

She did not answer, but her eyes filled with tears that she brushed away in anger. She had lost track of how many times she had given in to weeping, these past weeks.

“Ivorwen.” Dírhael spoke her name softly. “Come to bed, please.”

Ivorwen sighed and put down her sewing, and Dírhael kissed her lightly as she climbed into the bed beside him. She settled back against the pillows, staring down at her husband with the smallest bit of envy before she blew the candle out. Dírhael had always been there for her in the harshest moments of her foresight, had sat up with her countless nights listening as she tried to parse out the half-remembered fragments of an unknown future. He knew far better than most the burden and pain her visions could bring. But Dírhael slept, and Dírhael did not dream.

***

It was hours before she finally drifted off, and the dream that came was an old one, the image of a dread path through the mountains rising before her. Horsemen roamed the hills below, and Halbarad was there, enveloped in an embrace by Aragorn, before both men turned toward the entrance to the paths. But this time it shifted, and a woman in white stood before them, black hair streaming behind her, and she seemed to look directly at Ivorwen before she held out a hand and spoke:

Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call them
from the grey twilight, the forgotten people?
The heir of him to whom the oath they swore.
From the North shall he come, need shall drive him:
he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead.

“But you know this already, do you not, daughter of Gilbarad?” the woman directed this last at her, and Ivorwen blinked in surprise. Very rarely was she an active participant in her own dreams.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know the prophecy that I spoke, half an Age ago. And you know full well to whom it refers.”

Ivorwen’s eyes narrowed. She knew those words far better than she cared to. “You are Malbeth the Seer.”

“I am.” The woman nodded.

“A fine thing, to meet a prophetess long dead in a dream of the future.” Ivorwen shook her head. “Why have you come?”

Malbeth’s face remained impassive. “Your sight is clouded, Ivorwen. I thought I might be able to offer you some clarity.”

Ivorwen snorted. “You thought that, or the Valar did? Or whoever is responsible for this pestilence of a gift?”

“You have been hurt beyond measure,” Malbeth said. “Your faith has been met with little but pain and suffering, and it tests you now more than ever before.”

Ivorwen laughed, bitterly. “You do not need to be a Seer to realize that. Tell me, Lady, do you appear to me now with any true purpose? Or simply to mock my grief?”

“I understand your grief far too well to ever mock it,” Malbeth answered. “I simply wished to speak with you, as one seer to another, and remind you of the faith you once held…”

“No! I have had enough of seers and prophecies, and faith in a better future,” Ivorwen exclaimed, the anger she had suppressed for weeks finally spilling out of her in full force. “My whole life, I have been visited with these dreams, visions of uncertainty, and for what? Always have I tried to see the greater good, because what other path could I take? And it has given me nothing but children taken before their time, leaving me to linger as an old woman.‘The foundation of our hope,’ my grandson called me once. But what hope is there to have? It could not save my daughter!”

A little girl ran out laughing from behind Ivorwen, grey eyes sparkling, and ducked behind Malbeth to disappear into the mountain path. Ivorwen covered her mouth with her hands to keep from crying out. “Gilraen…”

She reached out a hand, but the phantom of a soldier reached out from the mountain to cut down the child in an eerie silence. She cried out once, before both figures vanished. Ivorwen let out a strangled sob, and turned back to Malbeth in anger. “What could you possibly understand of our suffering?”

Malbeth let out a breathy sigh, and the image of the mountain path faded into a rocky cliffside beside the sea. Malbeth was gone, but an old woman stood bent over a cane, staring out at the churning waters. Ivorwen approached her, tentatively, and she turned to face her.

“I foretold the fall of our kingdom,” she said sadly. “My son and grandson perished in the waters along with Arvedui. I told Araphant of the prophecy, and counseled him as best I could, but did I do all I could to stop them? Did I warn Arvedui himself to choose the path that seemed less hopeful? He knew the prophecy, but to the end of my days I stood at the water, staring out to where the ship was last seen, wondering…”

“Wondering if you might have done something differently,” Ivorwen finished.

“Arvedui had a good heart, but he was proud, and he was not one to listen to council. I could do nothing, and I thought, what good was my gift…”

“My daughter said that once,” Ivorwen said, the distant memory of their brief time together in Rivendell blending into the background of the dream. Gilraen’s steady hands as she pinned back her hair, the tremor in her voice as she spoke her bitter fears aloud…“‘What good is the gift of foresight, if you can do naught to change what you see.’ I challenged her, then, but I wonder now if that was very moment her hope began to fail.”

“Where your hope now begins to fail,” Malbeth said. “But Ivorwen, I think you understand the nature of my prophecy better than most. Better, perhaps, than any Dúnedain before you.”

Ivorwen snorted. “And how is that?”

“‘If they take the choice that seems less hopeful, then your son shall change his name and become king of a great realm. It takes a great deal of courage, to take the darker path when all around you seems lost. Arvedui and his men could not do it. But you, Gilbaradiel—you knew your daughter’s would be a hard path to walk, and you counseled her to choose it anyway. You knew there was something greater beyond the suffering she would endure.”

“It is a cold comfort now.” Ivorwen followed Malbeth’s gaze out to the sea, where the waves crashed in force against the rocks. A lone gull cried, and she wondered if this was how the Mariner’s wife sounded her grief, when she was forced to leave her children behind.

“There is little comfort left in this world, and that is beyond any of our ability to change. But let me tell you something. I believe the Valar have given us all enough of hidden meanings and half-formed visions. You—“

***

Ivorwen awoke with a sudden start, the sound of Dírhael’s snoring breaking through the depths of her dream. She turned so that her face was buried in her pillow and let out a muffled groan, trying for a moment to hold on to the final moments of the dream. Her heart was racing, and she forced herself to take a deep breath before she sat up in the bed. She was well used to the aches and nausea that came along with her visions, but that did not make them any less pleasant.

“Oh,” she finally said in a faint voice.

“Ivorwen?” Dírhael murmured blearily. “Are you all right?”

For a moment, Ivorwen thought to wake her husband, but found that, she wished still to be alone, for a little while longer.

She kissed him gently. “Go back to sleep, my love. It’s nothing.”

She wrapped a blanket around her and opened the back door quietly, leaning back against the outer wall of the house to stare up at the night sky. The moon had already gone down in the west, but the stars were still out, and Ivorwen searched for Gil-Estel, thinking back on Malbeth’s words. She did not know if she could call it courage, what she said to Gilraen all those years ago. And if it was, she did not know how much courage she had left within her. Besides, if Malbeth herself was any indication, seers did not always live to see their prophecies fulfilled.

She sighed. Her daughter had been named for the stars, after a fashion, and years later Gilraen had given her son the name of one. It was easier to look to them now, and imagine that there was a future beyond the pain she felt so keenly. And if she could imagine a future, perhaps she might find the strength to rebuild her faith.

***

Endnotes.
1. Malbeth the Seer is quoted briefly in The Return of the King, pg. 781 - Aragorn quotes in full the prophecy that is spoken here in Ivorwen's dream. Malbeth's prophecy regarding Arvedui and the fall of Arthedain is detailed in Appendix A.