Prologue

From atop a seat of obsidian, dark as deepest desire, she watched. Around her silence stretched, the peace of her halls clinging to her. She raised a hand, a single finger holding taut a thread of silver light. It stretched out amid a thousand other threads of light. This thread was special. A thread of silver, though a vein of black coursed at its heart. That thread had not always been that way, at its beginning it had been brilliant silver, as pure and otherworldly as the starlight it had been spun from. Unblemished. She remembered the moment it had changed. Why it had changed. Those effects pull on the thread, even now. She dismissed the memory, returning to the now. Curious concept for her. The Now. Watching as threads split and diverged, drawing towards convergences and junctions. Or a terminus. A thousand thousand possibilities, reflecting in fractured mirrors.
The thread in her hand. It drew closer to an intersection of many threads that too shone brightly. From that point, many possibilities. One, she knew well. One, she had been watching. Beyond that point, she saw many more bright threads. Branching. Reflecting possibility. She knows there is a greater convergence. There are many potentials for threads to be severed, cut short before reaching their terminus. She doesn’t dwell on those now. There are more immediate potentials, threads drawing together and diverging around bright points. 
She looked at the bright, untainted thread reaching back into the distance, seemingly to an origin beyond even her sight. Like so many other threads of silver, but to have a thread such as this, silver and bright. And changed in ways the woman had only seen in possibilities. And other bright threads around it. Threads of silver, threads of silver tinged with gold, and threads of white. So many bright threads, drawn together like the threads of a great tapestry, turned upon a great wheel. Moments of bright convergence. Other potentials of intersection, where some threads carved away. Or even ceased to exist. Cut short. Or simply at their terminus. At that terminus. Nothing is certain, no great pattern in the tapestry is inevitable. No future writ in the stars is certain to come to pass. Save one. She does not look to it. It forever lingered on the edges of her vision since that fated moment long ago. It drove every thread she held, every note she plucked, every possibility she observed.
She passed a youthful figure, one of her kin, those many she continued to think of as her children. She was garbed like all the others, and bowed her head in deference, her pale skin showing traces of faint patterns, the marker of her heritage in this shadowed place. 
“Blessed child,” she said as the youth looked up, her striking blue eyes a rare gift in such an achromatic realm. She smiled, a warmth at the look from her sovereign. The queen supped her face, holding a tender moment between them. 
Even this one, treasured as she was is Dor Lilómëa, might have the most consequential of roles to play. For even her thread, among so many that were born and lived under the aurora of shadow, carried a fate that drew ever closer to a bitter and bright intersection. She knew that if threads continued upon their dreaded path, tragedy was inevitable. And through those many, branching possibilities, her thread of silver and shadow drew closer to those bright threads that tempted fate. Like all children, she yearned for a greater place in the world. As sorrow rose in the queen’s breast, she resisted the effort to pray that she could be spared such sorrow. She learned long ago that she could not answer her own prayers, no matter how desperate. 
As she walked on silent footfalls, the vastness of her domain stretching around her, the weight of endless fates hung like a thousand stars above her. The gifts of prophecy granted her sight of the threads of fate, and for more than two and a half thousand years, she had safeguarded it. She knew what approached, she knew what she had done in anticipation. She had waited, she had schemed, she had prepared. And yet, she could never know if it would be enough. 
She pondered that instance, when that thread of shining silver had taken on its vein of darkness. Her emotions banished in time, it was impossible to forget that moment when an old feeling had blessed a dark queen upon her cold throne. Faith.