Lost Trees by feanorusrex

Chapter 1

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While Treebeard had said that the Entwives where lost, this was not strictly true. For though the Entwives’ location was unknown to the Ents, the Entwives themselves knew exactly where they were and furthermore, they had no desire to be found.

The Entwives had become quite tired of being known as, ‘Ent wives,’ a name contingent only upon the existence of the Ents, and implying that the Entwives existed only to wed the Ents. Among themselves, the Entwives called themselves ‘Treewomen,’ and the Ents, ‘Treemen,’ which were infinitely better terms, as the shared stem, ‘tree,’ was much more egalitarian and described a basic characteristic of their species, not a description of their marital status.

Of course the Ents would have known that the Treewomen felt displeasure at being called Entwives, had they ever taken the time out of their incredibly hurried tree lives to discuss these things with their spouses, but such was not the way of the Ents and they regarded their wives quicker, more plentiful talk as frivolous and unnecessary, not knowing until it was too late that, had they engaged in some of it with the Treewomen, they perhaps would not have lost them entirely.

Because of the Treewomen’s annoyance at the other half of their species, and the fact that their roots grew more shallowly than their male counterparts, they picked themselves up and left to tend their gardens elsewhere.

Though their gardens were beautiful, and they were free of their husbands, the Treewomen became troubled as they observed the growing darkness over Middle-earth. They waited, and watched, and thought.

Even then, they would not gone if not for the call. Darkness was coming, yes, but they had nowhere to go, and the Treewomen decided to wait out the darkness, with branches bent against the wind, for trees were used to annoyances, and could ooze sap over slashes, or harden their bark, and they had already moved once. And they could not go tromping over all of Middle-earth here and there. The tree women did not wish to make a spectacle of themselves and to be watched in yet another journey. Besides, to begin moving when there was danger would have been against the nature of a tree even ones with shallowly growing roots. Plants draw in on themselves in times of peril, they do not flee.

But the call came, and they escaped, and it proved necessary in the end, for great destruction was brought to their lands in the coming war. Even if such events with Sauron and that particular war had not come to pass, Treewomen would not have regretted leaving, for they would have chosen their new homes over the safest Middle-earth.

The call that came was silent, it was in the wind, and in the water, it came from the deepest, oldest parts of Middle-earth, it spoke of the beginning of all trees, and after that the beginning of Ents and Entwives, and of other trees that had been like them, living and understanding, life and might giving to a shining country. These trees had not been green but- silver and gold. They were lost now, but remained ever in the mind of she who sang the song.

And she, the singer- well the Treewomen, would have come at her call no matter what she had sung of, because of who she was. She was the earth itself, she was the life giver, she was the water that the tree roots drank in, sustaining.

And she called to them, the Treewomen, and only them, for the Treemen had a great role to play in the coming days, or at least the coming days according to the Ents, though they were still yet far off in the reckoning of other peoples on Middle-earth.

So they went. There was no need for a counsel, for the Treewomen were all of the same mind, and one day they picked up, roots and all, and left. How they left, how they disappeared into the West without being seen by Entish or other, more evil eyes, was a mystery, but the Treewomen did not care who saw them, or what they thought, for at this point so filled with longing, they would have paraded in front of all the eyes in Middle-earth to reach Yavanna.

They walked. It was a pleasant journey, although only half remembered, as it seem to pass in a dreamlike state, like walking through a cave, towards light at the end.

The Treewomen came in their journeying to the western sea but this provided no great obstacle for them, for they simply walked into the sea, their roots digging into the sand, the salt water lapping against their trunks. They had no fear of the sea. When the waves became too deep for even the tallest among them, they lifted up their roots and lay horizontal in the water, and let themselves be pulled forwards, against the waves, where they floated like felled logs.

It could have been a week, or even a year that they traveled on as such, for the Entish reckoning of time had never been perfectly accurate and previously, none of their people had gone too near to the ocean, on account of its salt water being poor nourishment for their roots.

On they went until the water became shallow again, and then they alighted on the beaches of Valinor. Here no Ent had gone before, but it seemed to the Treewomen familiar as if seen often in a perfect dream, half remembered. They shook their wheat hair free of the clinging salt spray, and began trekking up the sand, towards the figure who stood at the beginning of the treeline who, appeared as a Treewomen, more beautiful than the famed Fimbrethil, and as a woman draped in green and life.

And of the Treewoman’s lives after in the care of Yavanna Kementári, nothing much is known, only that that they lived happily, free forever of the term, ‘Entwives.’