A songbird at sunrise
The sound was soft, at first. I barely heard it - ridiculous, as it was coming from me. Soft, like the down of a newly-hatched golden plover - though those didn’t seem to exist anymore. Soft, and gentle, like a lullaby, or perhaps a song to awake to; did those have a name? Soft melodies writhed through the air, breaking the emptiness and grey.
I was singing.
I was singing for the first time in over one thousand years.
It was strange, how long it had been. Perhaps it had been more than one thousand, I hadn’t kept track of the days, of the years, for a long time. Since before the last city splintered, rotted, and fell.
I wandered over the dirty heaths that once had held grass and flowers of all manners: heather and thistles and sweet forget-me-nots. I had hoped that they would spring forth again one day, but they had not. I still hoped for their rebirth, just as I hoped for everything. Just as I hoped that the Valar had not forgotten this land, just as I hoped that one day Yavanna would journey back across the sea and fill the vales with flowers and the hills with hobbits, just as I hoped that Aulë would fill the mountains with gold and the sound of dwarven hammers, just as I hoped that the elves would journey back across the sea… just as I hoped that this land would not be dead.
And yet… it was very near it.
Only I lingered, I was almost certain, and perhaps old Tom, but I had not seen him since before the last of the hobbits disappeared.
“First and last” he had called himself, but where was he now?
Where were they all?
The song sounded sadder now, as I ever-wandered across the empty earth - here there had been a forest, then there had been the stumps of trees, and now… nothing.
Still I sang, hummed and hummed and hummed until words began to spill forth - the first I had heard in a long time, and the first I had spoken in even longer. Words from the old days, in the old language that I had spoken before the elves came to these shores, even before the Valar had fought overhead. Words from when I had spoken with old Tom, sitting around in the darkness, speaking of our hopes for light and all the marvellous things to come- back when the world was young.
And as the words spilled forth, they were not only words of sadness. I sang of my hope, of all that I wished for.
“Of honey and green-filled vales, of heather-strewn moors, of mountains filled with gold and sparkling gems”
(We could not wish for things back when the world was new, because no such things existed.)
I sang and sang and sang, music trailing through the air and soaking into the soil, calling coaxing.
And - perhaps two feet in front of me - a tiny blue flower slowly bloomed from the soil.
“Do not forget me, my friend, when the word is old.”
“What, old Tom forget you, little one? Never!”
Forget-me-not.