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Or find the link in my profile.
Now, back to the Avari.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Several days later. Morning. The clearing around the Tree]
[Ilvëa POV]
The Tree was singing.
Not with sound and not with words. But every morning when Ilvëa placed her hands on the bark and let her Light flow into the living wood, she felt something humming back at her.
A resonance. A vibration too deep for ears, felt only through the ósanwë bond that Cuileli had opened between her and this impossible, beautiful creation.
It had grown so fast.
When they'd planted the acorn on the Night of Arrival, it had been a small dark seed cupped between their palms, pulsing with mingled gold and silver Light. Days later, a shoot. Weeks later, a sapling taller than two Avari.
Now, less than a year since planting, the Tree rose nearly to the canopy of the surrounding forest. Its trunk was straight and pale as birch, but wider, stronger, with bark that held a faint luminescence even in full starlight. The leaves shimmered gold and silver, catching light that shouldn't have been there, casting soft shifting patterns on the ground below.
The farmers called it a miracle. Ilvëa called it stubborn. The Tree grew the way Selas worked, with a relentless, almost aggressive vitality that refused to slow down.
She smiled at the thought. Pressed her palms flat against the bark and closed her eyes.
"Good morning," she whispered in Avarin."Shall we begin?"
She let her Light flow.
Gold warmth poured from her hands into the wood. The Tree received it the way it always did, with a gentle pull, a grateful drawing-in, like a plant drinking water. She felt the exchange begin. Her Light flowing down through bark and sapwood into roots. The Tree's energy flowing back, green and cool and alive, filling her with the calm contentment that kept half the settlement coming back for Cuileli every day.
And then something happened.
It wasn't a word. It was an image, sudden and vivid, blooming inside her mind like a flower opening in fast motion.
She saw roots. Not as she would see them, not from outside, looking down at dirt. She saw them from the inside. She WAS the roots. Drinking deep, cold water from channels far below the surface. Tasting minerals. Feeling the slow press of earth against bark. The patient, ancient pleasure of drawing sustenance from soil that had been nourishing life since before the stars.
The image shifted.
Leaves.
Thousands of them. Each one a tiny hand opened to the sky, catching light, breathing air, performing the slow alchemy of turning starlight into growth. She felt the leaves the way she felt her own fingers. Each one distinct. Each one alive.
Another shift.
Small bright things near the roots. Pouring something golden and wonderful into the bark. The Tree liked these bright things. They gave it energy that tasted like sunlight concentrated into drops of honey. And the very small bright things, the ones that ran and laughed and touched the bark with tiny hands…
And underneath it all, beneath the images and sensations, a single overwhelming feeling:
Reaching. Growing. Wanting to be MORE.
Ilvëa screamed.
She jerked her hands from the bark and stumbled backward, nearly falling. The images shattered. Her own perception crashed back into place: forest, clearing, morning air, the startled faces of the farmers turning toward her.
Her hands were shaking. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
Enasulë, a young farmer who'd become Ilvëa's closest friend among the agricultural workers, was beside her in an instant.
"What happened? Ilvëa, what's wrong?"
"Ósanwë," Ilvëa whispered.
"Ósanwë?" Enasulë's eyes widened. "From whom?"
"From…" Ilvëa stared at the Tree. Its branches swayed gently overhead.
There was no wind.
"From the Tree," she said. "It spoke to me. The Tree spoke to me."
{image: The Awakening of Cuivorn}
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[One hour later]
[Selas POV]
The news traveled faster than the farmers could carry it. By the time a breathless young farmer skidded to a halt in front of the council building, I was already walking toward the Tree.
A small crowd had gathered. Ilvëa sat on a root, pale but composed, Enasulë beside her with one arm around her shoulders. The farmers stood in a loose semicircle, murmuring. A few had tried touching the bark themselves.
I knelt beside Ilvëa.
"Tell me exactly what you experienced."
She did. Every detail. The roots, the leaves, the sensation of being inside the Tree's perception. The warmth toward the Avari who shared their Light.
I listened without interrupting. When she finished, I stood and walked to the Tree.
Pressed my palm against the bark.
Closed my eyes.
For a moment, nothing. Just the familiar hum of Cuileli, the gentle exchange of Light that every Avari knew.
Then… something.
Faint. Like hearing a voice through a thick wall. Not images this time. A feeling.
The slow, vast, utterly alien consciousness of something that thought in seasons instead of seconds, that measured time by the growth of its own rings.
It knew I was there. It recognized my Light, silver warmth, familiar.
And underneath the recognition, that same feeling Ilvëa had described.
Reaching. Growing. Wanting.
I opened my eyes.
Every face in the clearing was watching me. Waiting.
"The Tree has developed sentience," I said.
Silence. The branches overhead rustled softly.
"Not intelligence as we understand it," I continued, choosing my words carefully. "It doesn't think in language. It thinks in… sensations. Images. Growth patterns. Its perception of time is completely different from ours. But it IS aware. It recognizes us. It responds to us. And it wants to keep growing."
"How?" Thoron asked. He'd appeared at some point, drawn by the commotion. "How is this possible?"
I looked up at the Tree, its pale trunk rising toward the canopy, its leaves casting that impossible gold-silver light on the forest floor.
"Ilvëa's Vanyar Light. The collective Light of every Avari who's practiced Cuileli at its roots. The waters of Cuiviénen that nourished the acorn before it was ever planted." I touched the bark again, feeling that faint pulse of awareness. "Three sources of power, feeding a single living thing for months. We didn't just grow a tree. We awakened something."
The word settled over the clearing like a stone dropping into still water.
Awakened.
"Cuivorn," I said quietly.
Ilvëa looked up. "What?"
"Its name. Cuivorn." I traced my fingers along the bark. "The Tree of Awakening. From cuivië, the root of Cuiviénen itself. Awakening and life. And orn — Tree."
I looked at Ilvëa. "Born from the waters where all Quendi first opened their eyes. And now it's opened its own."
Ilvëa's expression softened. She stood, crossed to the Tree, and placed her hands on the trunk again. This time without flinching.
"Cuivorn," she repeated softly.
The branches rustled. A sound almost like agreement.
The name stuck.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Days following. The clearing around Cuivorn]
What followed was the closest thing to a religious event I'd ever witnessed among the Avari.
News of Cuivorn's awakening spread through Avarstad like wildfire. Within a day, every Avari in the settlement had come to see the Tree. Within a week, even those working at distant construction sites and scouting outposts had made the trek back.
The pilgrimage was spontaneous and unstoppable.
Families arrived in clusters, approaching the Tree with a reverence I'd never seen my pragmatic, no-nonsense people display before.
They touched the bark. They poured their Light into its roots. They waited, breath held, for some flicker of response.
Not everyone felt something. Ósanwë sensitivity varied among Quendi, the same way musical talent or physical coordination did.
Some touched the bark and felt only warmth. Others received vague impressions, a sense of peace, a feeling of welcome. A rare few, like Ilvëa, experienced vivid images and sensations that left them wide-eyed and speechless.
But the children…
The children were different.
I noticed it on the third day. A group of young ones had gathered at Cuivorn's base, playing some incomprehensible game that involved running between the root-mounds and shrieking at each other. Normal child behavior.
But when one of them, a girl of perhaps thirty years who looked roughly six in human terms, placed both hands on the trunk and giggled, every branch above her head dipped lower.
Not wind. Not coincidence.
The branches reached down toward the children the way sunflowers turn toward the sun.
Ilvëa confirmed it through her own ósanwë sessions. Cuivorn's response to children was markedly different from its response to adults. Warmer. More attentive. Almost protective.
"It values new life," Ilvëa told me that evening, her face thoughtful.
"Makes sense," I said. "It's a living thing that was born from the energy of creation. Of course it gravitates toward the youngest and freshest sources of that same energy."
"It's more than that." She shook her head. "When the children are near, Cuivorn… relaxes. If a tree can relax. Its awareness becomes gentler. Less reaching, more… sheltering."
A sentient Tree that instinctively protected children. I filed that away under things that will be incredibly useful and also incredibly hard to explain to anyone outside our borders.
Even Eol came.
I almost missed it. The Master Smith rarely left his forge for anything short of a council session or an emergency. But on the fourth day, I spotted a dark-haired figure standing at the edge of the clearing, watching the Tree with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.
Reverence. Raw, unguarded reverence from a man who revered nothing except fire and metal.
For the Avari, Cuivorn had become something more than a miracle of Light and growth. It was a living fragment of Cuiviénen.
Cuivorn was a direct, breathing connection to our awakening, the closest thing to sacred ground that a people who worshipped no gods could possess.
And even Eol, who cared more about ore composition than spirituality, felt it.
He walked to the trunk. Placed one hand flat against the bark. Stood perfectly still for a long time. His lips parted. His eyes, usually narrowed in concentration or irritation, went wide.
Then he turned and walked back toward his forge without a word.
I intercepted him. "Well?"
"It's alive," Eol said. His voice was quieter than usual.
"I know. What did you—"
He looked at me with those intense dark eyes. Something in them hadn't fully settled back into its usual sharpness. "That's… remarkable."
And he walked away.
Classic Eol. But I noticed he glanced back at Cuivorn twice before the trees swallowed him from view.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Following weeks]
[Selas POV]
The first Druids emerged naturally.
A dozen Avari simply gravitated toward Cuivorn and didn't leave. Farmers mostly, a few scholars, one or two with no particular specialization beyond an unusual sensitivity to ósanwë.
They spent their days at the Tree's base, communing, experimenting, mapping the contours of its strange consciousness.
"Druids," I called them, borrowing a word from my other life.
The Druids discovered several things quickly.
Cuivorn's awareness grew stronger with each passing week. Whether that was natural development or a response to the constant flow of Light from its visitors, they couldn't tell. Probably both.
Its communication remained non-verbal. Images, sensations, emotions. No words, no grammar, no syntax. Trying to have a conversation with Cuivorn was like trying to discuss philosophy with someone who spoke only in paintings. Beautiful, but imprecise.
And it was still growing. Faster than ever.
That last part gave me ideas.
"If it's sentient," I said to Ilvëa and the lead Druids one afternoon, "and if it responds to direction through ósanwë… can we guide its growth?"
Ilvëa tilted her head. "Guide it how?"
"Shape it. Direct where branches grow, how the trunk expands, where the root system spreads." I looked up at Cuivorn's crown, now reaching above most of the surrounding canopy. "What if we could grow it into a structure? A living palace, shaped from inside by Cuivorn's own growth."
Silence.
"You want to live inside the Tree," one of the Druids
"I want Cuivorn to become the heart of Avarstad. Not just a symbol. An actual living building. The imperial seat, grown rather than built." I looked at the Druids.
"And the tree-homes we discussed back when we first arrived? The idea of combining living wood with stone construction, growing dwellings the way the Nandor grow their platforms but far beyond anything they've attempted? Cuivorn's awakening changes everything. If we can understand how directed growth works, we can finally make that vision real."
The Druids exchanged glances. They hadn't been part of that original council discussion, but they'd heard about it. Everyone had. The idea of living architecture had been circulating through Avarstad since the first planning sessions.
Back then, it had been theory. Temeryl had raised the obvious problem: how do you integrate living trees with stone structures?
My answer had been to channel Light into the growth and guide it. Test the theory on the acorn.
Well. The acorn had become Cuivorn. And the tests had been running for months.
Ilvëa's druids had been saturating the ordinary trees surrounding Cuivorn with Light during their Cuileli sessions. Pouring energy into neighboring roots alongside Cuivorn's.
The results were staggering.
Light-saturated wood was fundamentally different from normal timber. Denser. Harder. A test cut that should have taken three strokes of an axe took nine.
The grain held together under stress that would have splintered ordinary oak. And when the farmers deliberately damaged a branch to test healing, the wound closed in days instead of seasons. The tree grew new bark over the cut the way an elf's skin closed over a scratch.
Less hard than stone, yes. You couldn't build a fortress wall from it and expect it to stop a battering ram. But the flexibility was extraordinary. Where stone cracked under impact, Light-wood flexed and absorbed the force. A different kind of strength.
And then there was the fire test.
Balga had been against it. "You want to set fire to the trees we've been nurturing for months?"
Her expression had suggested I'd lost my mind. But I'd insisted, and we'd chosen a small Light-saturated sapling at the edge of the clearing.
The torch touched the bark. The wood charred — blackened and smoked.
But it didn't burn.
The flame licked across the surface and found nothing to consume. The Light woven into every fiber of the wood rejected the fire. The sapling scorched on the outside, ugly black marks marring the pale bark, but the living wood underneath remained intact. Already beginning to heal the damage before the smoke had cleared.
In a world where dragons existed, where Morgoth's balrogs carried whips of flame, where fire was the primary weapon of the Enemy…
"We'll investigate," the eldest Druid said carefully.
"Start with the fire resistance," I said. "I want to understand exactly how it works, how much Light is needed, and whether we can scale it to entire structures."
The Druid nodded slowly, and I could see the implications settling into his expression one by one.
Good. At least someone else understood what we were sitting on.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[That evening. The riverbank. Alone]
After the Druids left, I sat by the Taurion and let the full weight of what we'd done settle onto my shoulders.
We grew sentient life from a seed.
Like a god.
The thought wouldn't stop circling. We'd built forges and roads and walls and an army. We'd invented cement and formations and a system of governance. But all of that was engineering. Mortal, in a sense, even if the builders were immortal.
This was different.
This was creation.
And the gods here were real. Not abstract concepts debated in philosophy classrooms. Real beings, with real power, who lived on a real continent across a real ocean.
Eru Ilúvatar, the Creator Himself, probably wouldn't mind. We were His children, after all. Creating was in our nature. Walking His path. He might even approve.
But the Valar…
Gods don't tolerate competition. Maybe not openly. Maybe not directly. But sooner or later, word of what the Avari had accomplished would reach Aman. And the Valar would act.
Through the High Eldar, their faithful servants. Through Morgoth, their wayward brother. Through circumstances and misfortunes that would look like coincidence and feel like a knife in the back.
I thought of Fëanor. The greatest of the Noldor, who'd created the Silmarils, who'd captured the Light of the Two Trees in three perfect gems.
And what had that gotten him? A curse, an exile, a burning death, and thousands of years of war and grief.
But I understood him. Living forever in a golden cage, no matter how gilded, was still a cage. The Noldor rebellion made sense.
I respected it.
The trick was not making Fëanor's mistakes. His Silmarils were jewels. Beautiful, sacred, and utterly useless for anything practical. Glorified lanterns.
What if you made something better?
Light-storage crystals. Not gems to hoard and fight over, but tools. Pour Light in, draw energy out. Batteries for magical shields.
Power sources for defensive wards over cities and fortresses. Personal protection against dragon-fire, balrog-flame, the dark sorcery of Morgoth's servants.
Selarils, I thought. Or whatever the Avari end up calling them. The idea is what matters.
And runes. Our own system, distinct from Daeron's Cirth or Fëanor's Tengwar. Avari runes that could be charged with Light. Carved into walls, weapons, armor.
Warning runes that flared when enemies approached. Defensive runes that hardened stone against siege weapons. Communication runes that carried messages across distances.
The possibilities cascaded through my mind like water over rocks.
Not now, though. Too much else to do. The fortress wasn't finished. The government was barely established. The imperial institutions needed years of development before I could afford to pursue magical research.
But I needed to write these ideas down. I'd been carrying too many plans in my head for too long, relying on elven memory that was admittedly excellent but not infinite. Ideas slipped through the cracks when you were managing a civilization. Good ideas.
Tomorrow. I'd deal with all of it tomorrow.
Tonight, I'd sit by the water and watch the stars and try not to think about the fact that in a few weeks, they'd be putting a crown on my head.
A wreath, technically.
Same weight, though.
{image: Cuivorn Leaf and Bark Study}
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 14.1]
GLOSSARY
CONCEPTS
Cuivorn — "Tree of Awakening." The sacred sentient Tree of the Avari, grown from the acorn Ilvëa gave Selas at the Sundering. Named from cuivië (awakening/life, the root of Cuiviénen) and orn (tree). Developed awareness through the combined influence of Vanyar Light, Teleri Light of Selas, collective Avari Light through Cuileli, and the waters of Cuiviénen absorbed by the original acorn.
Druids — Avari who dedicate themselves to studying and communing with Cuivorn. Specialists in plant-consciousness and Light-guided growth.
Selarils — (Concept only, not yet developed) Selas's idea for Light-storage crystals. Practical alternatives to the Silmarils: energy sources for magical shields, protective wards, and defensive systems.
Light-Runes — (Concept only, not yet developed) Selas's idea for an Avari runic system that can be charged with Light to produce active magical effects.