An aubade, of sorts
It rained for the whole night - or what passed for a night for her. By the end, the ground was soaked and the plants sprang up even more eagerly than before, petals and leaves shining with water - water she had sung from the sky! Flowers and grasses were one thing, weather quite another.
Still, her problem was not entirely fixed. The plants had rain, but they needed sunlight, too.
And so she sang again, pleading with the fog and smog to clear away from the sky, wishing for the bright sunbeams that had once scattered the earth. As she sang - and this seemed to happen so often these days - she remembered more.
“Look, little one. Look at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. Yavanna has done well, hasn’t she?”
“That she has, Tom, that she has”
They had stared a while longer at the new forest, at the way that the leaves danced in the golden air.
“You know, Tom, I would always be content here if there was sunlight and gently blowing trees.”
“So would I, little one.”
She sang for a long time: seconds or minutes, hours or days - time passed strangely in this time, after all Ages. But slowly, ever so slowly, the sky seemed to grow lighter. Then lighter. Then lighter. And finally, finally a tiny chink of dark blue sky showed through the fog that really didn’t look so much like smoke anymore, and more like dark, night-time clouds.
She laughed (after so long without joy, she seemed to laugh at everything).
The chink grew wider, and more opened still - the sky turning from a blanket of thick wool to a thin lattice-work lace.
And then, just like that, the sky was open, and she turned just in time to see the first glow of the sun at the edge of the land.
And the sky was dark blue in the centre but lighter at the horizon, and a pale pink glow showed in the east, outlining the farthest shining stars in silver.
And a soft, pale grey mist hung over the meadow and it looked nothing like the thick fog that had come before.
And, oh, the world seemed to be singing, even as she realised that she had fallen silent.
She didn’t laugh this time,
Instead she sat and watched the sky grow lighter. She nodded gently at Eärendel’s star as it gently faded like a whisper in the mist that sank into the ground, and listened to the world as it silently sang a song of awesome, breathtaking, softly spectacular hope.
****
The air seemed to thrum with possibilities as the sun shone over the moor. She had sung the plants into being, and now she had controlled the weather. If she could do that, what else could she do?
The answer came to her. She could remake the world, make it clean and good for living once more. In all likelihood, she would majorly be overstepping the unspoken boundaries set for her by the Valar and by Eru, but they didn’t seem to be here now, did they? Where were the Valar when the air was filled with smoke, where were the Valar when the forests shrivelled, died, turned to dust? Where were the Istari when the race of dwarves fell, when the hobbits died, when the men, too, left this land? 'Whoa,' she thought, 'Better turn down the resentment. It would not do to get on the Valar’s bad side.'
But then again, would it really do any harm to continue with her little excursion? It wasn’t like she wanted to create a new world, she just wanted to … restore this one. But not to how it was at first, she realised, before Melkor, nor to how it was later, when the elves and dwarves and hobbits had left. She would remake it to the time that she had loved best - it was her world, after all! Not hers to shape, perhaps, but she had lived there longest (apart from Tom) and she had loved it best. It was her who had visited the last dwarves, her who had sheltered and hidden the last of the hobbits, her who had walked among the humans and seen that, despite their faults, despite all the harm they had done to Arda, she could not hate them. This was her world. If she felt possessive about it, fine then! She would be selfish, and make this world in the vision of the time that she had loved best.
A purpose.
And, with that in mind, she began to walk, singing as she went. ‘First,’ she thought as she wandered over the waking land, ‘I will remake the hills of the hobbit’s dwellings. I always did like the Shire. I think I’ll walk through the place where the Old Forest was on the way there.’
“Why did you settle here, Tom? Why not with the elves or the hobbits?”
“The forest suits me, little one. You go and see the world and the peoples, and I will enjoy my solitude.”
“Alright then, Tom. I will be visiting, though.”
“I count on it.”
‘Where did you go, Tom?’ she wandered as she walked over the land, singing and trailing flowers, grasses, streamlets, rocks, and trees ‘Where did you go when the forest fell?’