The Spirit of the Mountain by Elrond's Library

The Music

When we came down to Eä, we knew our purpose. My place was in the land, my siblings to the water, and the air, and the firmament between the stars. I drifted through stone and grass until the Music compelled me to stop, to breathe. 

I sung to the heat, building it to higher and higher tempos, until it finally crescendoed into the night air in a blaze of molten rock and ash and poison gas. I sang to the stars again as it cooled, and they sang back, urging me on. 

I grew tall, and strong, and I waited. 

The First Enemy came, and walked my mountain. He sought my thoughts on the Lamps the Valar had built. I shrugged as I escorted him away from my mountain, my heat. Let them shine; I cared little enough. I wanted to sing. 

They fell, and the world was changed. 

The land to the north and to the east shuddered. I rose higher, and higher, and it was not my doing. It brought me closer to the stars, to be sure, but it was an unearned growth. Unnatural. My grasp on the heat under the earth was lessened, and I poured more and more of my song into the growth of my mountain, but it barely mattered. It became difficult to climb, nigh impossible to find the release of ash and smoke. 

So I waited. The land would change. I was patient. 

Oromë slept at the precipice, and whispered to me as we lay together of the Children he was looking for. He asked me if I knew ought, and I knew naught that could help him. Only the screams that echoed from Utumno in the far north. He sighed, and kissed me, and told me that the Powers in the West would raze Utumno as soon as the Children were found and kept safe. I wished him luck, for I wanted nothing of this war. 

It wasn’t long before the North shook with their efforts. The First Enemy was chained, the winds whispered, and captured, and would not be set free for a long while yet. 

And so I sang, and grew, and waited. 

The First Children skirted the base of my mountain and slept among my hills, but they did not stay for long. I invited the spirits of the forest to my hills, hoping to shelter them, but it was in vain. They did not stay. I watched them leave, traveling west in the darkness under the stars, and I mourned. I understood, then, why Oromë had wanted them to be found. Ilúvatar had blessed us with them, and I wanted to keep them safe. 

I sang my last growth in the time between the Chaining and the Return. I was tall enough now, to sing easily to the stars, and to receive the snows in the winters. I was content to keep the fumes and the heat away. I still wanted to invite the Children to my mountain. 

In time, I hoped, they would come. Stone is patient.