Disclaimer: I don't own Tolkien's work and don't intent to make profit
In This Wood
I played with the ipod as I walked down the street. After six blocks it finally began playing the song I wanted it too, but by then I no longer wanted to hear any music at all. I turned off the machine to be attacked by some incomprehensible advertisement for a sale in a shop up ahead. Cars honked at one other while one driver attempted to park in a space too small for his vehicle and cranes lifted more pillars for another office block. What had happened to that lovely Victorian house I remembered? Time raced ahead of me. It seemed only days ago I have wondered at the advent of radio, I now had 20 megabytes (if I only I knew what that meant) to fill up with my own selections.
Those few of us who remained from the ancient times now lived by men's rules. We had found ourselves jobs and payed taxes like every other citizen. We voted in elections and made attempts to follow current fashions. Of-course a measure of fraud was always necessary, fake birth certificates were a commodity more valuable than mithril among us. On the rare occasion when we met, since we were a silent community, we would share secrets on how to avoid exposure.
I left the main street for a path through the city park where it was somewhat calmer. My feet stirred the gravel while trees on either side loomed over me. Their leaves were green and whispering with excitement at the approaching storm. I sensed some deep awareness in them, but to speak to them would be no more successful than a human attempting to communicate with his goldfish. They no longer had any conscious thought.
The path forked and a statue of a mounted general stood before me. I paused beneath the shadow of the rearing horse. Once I had spoken with the rider, no, more than once. What was his name? Memory failed.
ElurédI narrowed my eyes. The sound a dim murmur even to my ears, no human would be able to hear it. After a long moment I thought I had heard it again. The oak behind the statue. I shook my head, and then stepped over the low parapet onto untrodden grass. The trunk was too thick for three to wrap their arms around it and it stood higher than any other living thing, it had the presence I had always associated with my great-grandfather. It was unlike the other trees in this park. I bowed my head a little and reached out to feel the rough texture of its bark.
After millennia of using some contrived version of our mother tongue and the language spoken in the vicinity of our dwelling, my brother and I had discarded elven speech completely. I struggled to remember, but in the end, I was not about to embarrass myself by abandoning human speech.
'Hello,' I said. 'How is it that you have never sought me out before? I would have come if I'd known.'
In the old days such direct address would have the trees all around me in a stir and conversing with me. No such response here. I dropped my eyes to the ground. Elurín and I had once survived because the trees had guided us and had assured us the aid of other forest creatures, but I never did do anything to prevent this silence occurring in all the ages since. Then…at last I heard the oak. It was a moan of a mute attempting to speak. I sighed.
The world became hazy, I looked up to realise it had begun raining. A flash of light brightened the gloom for a short moment and then a boom came like a hammer beating upon the anvil. I knew the danger of lightning striking tall trees in these brief summer storms, but I sat down against the oak's trunk all the same.
Branches moved above. I could see rain pounding all about, but not a drop fell on me. Hope caught me in the freshness that came with the water, which the dry earth was glad to receive. Perhaps I could revive this oak, just as my ancestors had first awoken the trees in the earliest of days. But even if I still had the power to do so, did I want to? To bring consciousness to a world of exhaust fumes and lumberjacks would be to give birth to a child intended from the first day to be murdered before adolescence.
I would have liked to smile, but my eyes would have displayed their grief no matter what my lips re-enacted. Eyes that had once shone with the light of the stars and the Two Trees had faded in the remaining elves with the passage of time. Such was our fate I think.
It was a cruel life. Six thousand years, well, it had been longer for my brother and I, and we still could only observe human society. Never a close relationship and never the truth to anyone who was not one of us. We half-smiled at mankind's achievements, we grieved at its failures, we were only ever strangers. And what would I do if I could return to the elven world? I had never properly participated in the elven society after the sons of Fëanor had sacked my home. I was only ever that unsightly sculpture standing between two paths, fixed into the ground.
Thunder cracked the air; I felt my self-struggling to breathe so leaned my head against the oak to hear its hum. Soothing. I hoped it would understand my gratitude for the attempt, but I did not think anything could soothe what my heart knew. Just as the clouds unleashed a heavier onslaught of rain, my own resented tears came.
I wiped my cheeks, but there was no stopping them. It had been a long time since I had expressed any real emotion. The tears were for all the evil the elven race has committed; all the sins of mankind and all those who perished as a result. This was for the permanently wounded Middle-earth, for all the ones who left it weeping and all those who stayed until they could no more.
The oak tried to express something, but I was in no mood to listen. Branches danced in the wind casting my memory back to childhood when we had been lost in that endless dark wood. Technology and government had replaced the wild beasts; fear of death became terror of exposure so I had not moved far at all in all these years. What was different this time? Elurín, my dearest brother, had passed to the Undying Lands a few months ago.
In this wood, I was alone.