Maybe she shouldn't have tried to make Galadriel's scrying pool work on her own, but Gladriel had given her certain rights with the keeping of Nenya, after all, and Legolas had wanted to know how their children would be like. Would they have his golden hair and her eyes of scintillating Emerald? His lightning quick reflexes and her voice like bird's song? Or her raven tresses, glinting through with auburn streaks and bangs burned purest white from where Suron Himself had burned her, long ago, casting her forth from the Land of Mordor... So she went to the Mirror while the Fellowship slept, and she looked in.
She thought there would be ripples, the movement of wind, pyrotechnics, maybe an Elfman score. Instead there was only the face, mocking her expressions with features that-- she swore by Elbereth! Glithonel!-- were not her own!
The face was narrow and thin, the chin jutting. A broad forehead contained eyebrows which had never been pluched and resembled nothing so much as narrow clumps of burned grass in the gap of Rohan. The eyes that peered nervously into the pool might have been blue-- perhaps even the blue of cloudless skies, of the sparkling waters of the Havens, of Vilya the great (her charge from Lord Elrond, worn on her left ring finger with Nenya on her right)!-- but they were rendered microscopic through occuli legenduim strapped to the unfortunately prominent and embarrassingly unpierced ears.
She took issue with the skin tone. It was patchy and pink, running here and there to a bumpy red, here and there tipped with the volitile white of miniature volcanoes: the landscape of Mordor with a tiny, perfect Barad-dur right in the middle of the forehead that was NOT her own!
But what hooked into her heart and caught like an iron barb was the hair in the mirror. Nothing in the image before her suggested the lustre and texture of silk, nor any other fabric, rare or common. It didn't float, it didn't glint. It didn't even wave. Or fall. It might have frizzed, perhaps. Or hung.
And. It was. Brown.
She clutched Nenya to her chest, the hand bearing Vilya pressed against her mouth. She wished to cover her eyes, but it was not possible. The white stone burned like the breath of the Balrog, sank cold tendrils into her chest and trapped her there. Unable to do anything but stare, panic eluded her, preceeded by a dull, spreading heaviness of limb and mind, the realisation of a horrible thing...
And then she saw the face over the shoulder of the face that was, in truth, her very own, the pale white pustule like a sickly moon that shamed her with its pity and loved her in her utter shame, and in that moment, she Knew Despair.