Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N: Slightly odd voice for Silmarillion fiction, I know. Criticism of the constructive kind, and suggestions as to who the narrator actually is, gladly accepted.

Spiderwebs

So there was this Lady of the Maiar who used to sing like a spider. Not that you could take your average spider, and have it sing like her; spiders don't sing, I don't think.

But her song was like a spider's web, sheer and silvery and brittle and beautiful; the loveliest thing you can see. And treacherously dangerous, because a spider's web looks innocent, until suddenly - bang! - you're caught, helpless.

Never were there happier flies than those of us who were caught in her webs, though. We escaped every time, after all, safe and sound, and alive and unharmed. A little happier, perhaps. No Gloomweaver was she, this one.

And then she crawled away, this spider, to strange lands far away.

And then she came back.

But in the time she had been away, she had transformed, turned from a spider into a fly herself. She had been caught in another, greater web. You probably know of it too, it's the one that's the greatest of them all.

So this Lady who used to be a spider and is now a fly, she hasn't been weaving any webs since she returned. Instead she walks in silence (although flies should be flying, and not silently) in the Garden of Dreams. Perhaps the dream she walks in is of times long ago when she was a spider, but I don't think that it is.

Perhaps her dreams and her visions and her memories - it's the garden of them all, you remember? - are of those other flies who were caught in that web with her. (Although, from what I hear about them, they sound like mayflies, and not really flies at all.)

You tell me.

Anyway, it was so long ago that she lived in the strange webs of her far away country, but she is still caught, and it is even longer ago since I was caught in hers before she went away. The thing about metaphorical spiders is this: the webs they weave never really go away.

We will never get away, me or the spider-fly-lady.

I wish all flies were as lucky as me.