And She Vanished by polutropos

Chapter 1

Melian kneels and folds over, hands outstretched and pressed against the tree’s grey-brown skin. The Queen is small beside the massive trunk of Hírilorn. She offers her tears as libation.

“Kementári,” she prays, “please forgive me. I have failed to protect even this fragment of your creation.”

A murmur beneath the earth, from the North – the discordant strains of the Enemy’s song. A Music that has not been heard here since before the first rising of the Sun.

Melian shudders and weeps anew. She clings to the tree’s thick folds where its roots meet the trunk, calling to mind the abundant shape her teacher once took when all things were young. “Tell me, was I wrong to stray from your love? Was I wrong to bind myself to him? To create life from myself, as you did?”

But it was not as Yavanna had done. The kelvar and the olvar were but thought and love made real. Melian had made flesh of her own spirit and offered up that body so that Lúthien could be. There are none among the Ainur who did as she. She is alone.

The body in which she loved and brought forth life is unravelling, disappearing. Her power is stretched thin. She thinks, Was my deed of creation mere indulgence? Did I overreach? Will I ever heal? Or will I be no more than a wraith, frail and mute until the End?

“Is this my punishment, beloved Queen?” Her words are but wisps of sound. Her corporeal voice is faltering. “I did it for love of you.”

The tree hums against her gossamer hands. Yavanna speaks. Not since the World went Dark has Melian heard the voice of any of her kindred. The sweep of Melian’s delicate neck tilts upwards as if caught in a breeze. Hírilorn’s breath takes the shape of long fingers and catches the tendrils of her soul in its palms.

Take courage, Melyanna, says the Queen of Earth, as thou didst when all others of our kind despaired. Yea, even I. It is time that I healed thee.

All falls silent. The air stills. Earth rises and sky descends to wrap around what remains of Melian’s form. They come together like a giant lid closing on her perception. Melian loses sight of the verdant majesty of her former realm. She panics – grieving, trembling. Then her warm tears fill the globe of Yavanna’s womb. The pain gathers to a point, a life-giving seed at the core of her being, and bursts forth as a newborn stalk, full and straight and fearless.

Melian is home.