[Year 1155 of the Trees. The night before the coronation. The banks of the Taurion]
[Selas POV]
The river was quiet tonight.
I sat on the flat stone that had become my thinking spot, boots off, feet in the grass, watching the Taurion slide past in its new stone-lined channel.
{image: Selas}
Behind me, Avarstad hummed with preparation. Tomorrow was the coronation. Avari were arriving from every corner of Taur-im-Duinath, from the distant scouting camps, from the river fortification sites, from the quarries and the timber camps deep in the forest.
Even the scouts who operated beyond our borders had been recalled. Every Avari in the realm would be present.
Three thousand souls. All of them expecting me to stand on a platform beneath a sentient Tree and accept a silver wreath and the weight of everything it represented.
I should have been reviewing my speech. Going over the ceremony's sequence with Dirmal. Checking details. Doing something productive.
Instead, I was sitting barefoot by a river, watching stars.
Some habits you don't outgrow.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Ever since the Fëa-vesta with Ilvëa, something had shifted. When our souls touched, when every barrier between us dissolved and we stood bare before each other in a space beyond words, it cracked something open in me too.
Memories I'd been ignoring. Thoughts I'd shoved into the deepest corners of my mind and bricked over with centuries of work and duty and deliberate, stubborn refusal to look.
Even then, though, I hadn't opened every door. Some rooms I'd kept shut even with our souls intertwined.
Whether Ilvëa noticed those closed doors during the Fëa-vesta… I wasn't sure. She'd never mentioned them.
Either she hadn't seen them, or she had and chose to walk past without trying the handles. Knowing me, perhaps, better than I knew myself. Understanding that some locks need to be opened from the inside.
And in that silence, in that gentle refusal to demand what I wasn't ready to give, she'd offered me something more valuable. The right to hold my deepest secrets and my oldest fears without judgment and pressure. Without the suffocating expectation that love meant surrendering every last corner of yourself.
Now those cracks were widening. And the thoughts seeping through them wouldn't let me rest.
The Avari had changed. I'd said it before, thought it before, acknowledged it in council sessions and private conversations. But tonight, on the eve of becoming their Emperor, the full scope of that change pressed against my chest like a held breath.
The March had reshaped us. The losses, the hardships, the thousand small cultural shifts born from necessity. The slow, dreaming Quendi of Cuiviénen were gone.
Where other elven nations drifted like rivers finding the easiest path downhill, the Avari cut through rock.
But the deeper truth, the one I'd been slow to acknowledge, was simpler and stranger.
Just as I changed them, they changed me too.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
I hadn't noticed it happening. Changes that take centuries are invisible when you're living inside them.
But I wasn't the same person who'd woken up in an infant's body at Cuiviénen with a skull full of someone else's memories and a desperate, frantic urgency to prepare for a future only he could see.
That person had been afraid. Operating on adrenaline and borrowed knowledge.
Planning in years. Thinking in human timescales.
Pushing, pushing, always pushing, because time was running out, because Morgoth was coming, because the Silmarils hadn't been made yet but they would be and when they were the world would burn.
It had its advantages, but looking back, the downsides outweighed them.
That wasn't who I was anymore.
Somewhere in the centuries of leading, building, listening, somewhere in the thousands of council sessions and evening conversations and quiet moments watching my people be themselves… I'd slowed down.
I planned in centuries now. Not because I forced myself to, but because it felt natural. Because the part of me that once panicked at the thought of decades-long projects now understood, bone-deep, that a civilization built in haste was a civilization built on sand.
Their patience had tempered my urgency. Their love of nature, their instinct for beauty, their refusal to sacrifice craftsmanship for speed, all of it had seeped into me through years of proximity until I couldn't tell where their influence ended and my own instincts began.
I cared about trees now. Not as resources to be managed, but as living things worthy of attention and respect. When had that happened?
When had I stopped thinking of myself as a human trapped in an elf's body?
That thought stopped me cold.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
There it was.
The thing I'd been avoiding. The locked room in my mind that I'd sealed shut somewhere around Year 1110 and hadn't opened since.
My previous life.
I leaned back on the stone and let the sky fill my vision. Stars upon stars upon stars, an Arda sky uncorrupted by light pollution, so dense with constellations that the spaces between them seemed to glow.
The memories were still there. I could feel them, the way you feel a scar through cloth:—the shape was recognizable, but the details were gone.
My mother's face. My father's voice. The apartment where I'd grown up. The university campus.
The weight of a smartphone in my pocket, that constant reassuring rectangle of glass and metal that connected me to everything.
All of it faded to watercolors. I could remember that I'd had a family, could remember that I'd loved them, but the specifics had dissolved into centuries of elven existence like sugar in rain.
It had been gradual, and I'd let it happen.
In the earliest years, when I was still an infant struggling to control a body that didn't work like a human one, the memories had been vivid.
Painfully vivid.
I'd lie awake at night, unable to speak, unable to write, unable to do anything except think, and I'd replay everything.
Not just the plot of the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings. Everything. My life. My world. The taste of pizza. The sound of traffic. The way my mother laughed.
But even then, the priority had been the knowledge. The history of Arda that would keep me and my people alive.
Writing didn't exist yet among the Quendi. No alphabet. No way to record information except memory. So I'd developed a system.
Every night, before sleep, I would mentally recite everything I remembered about Tolkien's legendarium. The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings. The Appendices. The Unfinished Tales.
Everything I'd ever read, every detail I'd ever absorbed.
Night after night.
And It worked.
The knowledge became part of me, as natural and accessible as my own name. That was why I could still recall the sequence of events in the War of Wrath or the genealogy of the House of Finwë with perfect clarity centuries later. Not because the memories were fresh, but because I'd memorized them like scripture.
The personal memories, though… those I hadn't drilled. Those I'd let fade.
At first it was unintentional. There were only so many hours before sleep, and the choice between rehearsing the date of Morgoth's attack on the Trees and remembering what my little sister looked like for her eighth birthday was, pragmatically, not a choice at all.
Later, it became deliberate.
The personal memories hurt. They were a window into a life I couldn't return to, a world that might not even exist, people who were either dead or had never been born depending on how you understood the metaphysics of my situation.
Holding onto them served no purpose except to cause pain.
So I'd let them go. One by one. Year by year.
Like releasing paper boats onto a river and watching them float away until they were too small to see.
Now, sitting by the Taurion on the night before I accepted a crown, I realized I couldn't picture my mother's face anymore.
I waited for that to hurt.
It didn't. Not the way it would have hurt a century ago, or two centuries ago. It was a quiet ache, old and soft, like pressing on a bruise that had long since healed.
I'd grieved them.
The grief had run its course the way rivers run to the sea: inevitably, and without any need for permission.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
But there was another thing in that locked room. Deeper than the faded memories. Older than the grief.
Fear.
Not of orcs. Not of Morgoth. Not of war or death or something else.
Fear of why.
I didn't know how I'd gotten here. That was the fundamental, irreducible problem at the center of my existence, the question I'd buried so deep that most days I genuinely forgot it existed.
How does a human being die, or sleep, or blink, and wake up as an infant in a world that was supposed to be fiction?
Reincarnation?
Some cosmic cycle of souls rotating through realities?
Random chance, a statistical impossibility that happened anyway because infinity makes everything possible eventually?
Or had someone put me here?
That was the thought that tightened my chest. Because in this world, "someone" had candidates. Eru Ilúvatar, the Creator who sang everything into existence.
The Valar, who shaped the world to His design. Beings of incomprehensible power who might have reached across the boundary between realities and placed a human soul into a Quendi body for reasons I couldn't begin to guess.
And if they had… what did they expect?
Was I performing correctly? Was there a plan I was supposed to follow, a destiny I was meant to fulfill? Or was I a mistake, an anomaly, a bug in creation that hadn't been noticed yet?
And worse, the question that cut deepest: had this fear shaped me without my knowing?
When I stood at Cuiviénen and argued against following the Valar's summons, when I chose to stay, when I built the Avari into something independent and defiant… was that really me?
My conviction? My free will? Or was it fear wearing the mask of principle? A terrified soul lashing out at gods it couldn't understand, dressing up rebellion as philosophy?
Did I choose the Avari because I believed in freedom, or because I was afraid of what the Valar might see if I got too close?
Every decision I'd ever made suddenly had a shadow behind it. Every choice carried the possibility that it hadn't been a choice at all, just fear running in a direction that looked like courage.
The possibility that I was being watched, that some vast intelligence was observing my every decision and measuring it against criteria I couldn't see… that thought had sent me spiraling in the early years.
It was the reason I'd locked the room in the first place. Because the alternative to not thinking about it was thinking about it, and thinking about it led nowhere except madness.
You cannot function as a leader while constantly wondering if a god is about to pull the rug out from under you.
So I'd stopped wondering. Buried the question. Built walls around it thicker than anything Temeryl could design. And it had worked. For centuries, it had worked.
But tomorrow I was accepting a crown.
Tomorrow I was becoming Emperor. Vaeratar.
The sovereign of an immortal people who would look to me not just for guidance but for meaning.
For purpose. For a vision of the future that justified everything they'd sacrificed and endured.
I couldn't carry that weight with a locked room in my head.
So I opened it.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Fear.
Let it fill me. Let it do its worst.
Why am I here?
— I don't know.
Will I ever know?
— Probably not.
Is something watching me?
— Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn't matter.
That last thought surprised me. But as I turned it over, tested it against my own convictions, I found it was solid.
A genuine conclusion, arrived at through three hundred years of living.
It doesn't matter.
If Eru put me here, then whatever plan He had, I was already executing it. I'd spent my entire second life building, protecting, creating. If that wasn't what He wanted, He'd had plenty of opportunities to course-correct.
If the Valar were involved, then they could take their expectations and drown them in the Belegaer. I hadn't followed the Valar's summons, and I wasn't about to start now.
And if they ever came with demands, if they ever showed up at our borders expecting submission or gratitude or obedience, then three thousand Avari would send them packing right alongside me.
And if they came with swords, we'd meet them with swords. The same way we'd meet Morgoth. The same way we'd meet his dragons and his balrogs and anything else that crawled out of the dark with hostile intent.
If it was random chance, then I owed nothing to anyone except the people I'd chosen to lead.
And if it was something else entirely, some mechanism beyond my comprehension, some omnipotent being pulling strings from beyond the fabric of creation… then thinking about it was pointless.
You can't plan against omnipotence. And if it wasn't truly omnipotent, then sooner or later the Avari would find a way to reach even that. We were stubborn like that.
And this fear… this pathetic, lurking, centuries-old fear of the unknown, of the WHY… it was beneath me. It had been beneath me for a long time.
I should have killed it ages ago instead of locking it away and pretending the room didn't exist. Hiding from a question is a coward's answer.
I'd outgrown it decades ago and simply hadn't noticed.
To hell with the gods. All of them.
The words settled into me like an anchor finding bottom.
And then the realization that had been building all night, the one that the fear had been blocking, finally broke through.
I am not a human in an elf's body. I sat up straighter. The stars burned overhead.
I am an elf. With memories of being human.
An immortal elf. With practically limitless potential and all of eternity to realize it.
The distinction was everything.
A visitor. A tourist. Someone wearing a costume that never quite fit.
That wasn't me. Not anymore.
I was the best swordsman my people had ever produced. The Chief who led them across a continent and built a civilization from nothing.
Tomorrow I would be their Emperor, and every single one of those lives depended on my decisions, my clarity, my strength.
I cared about starlight and running water and the sound of wind through leaves with a depth of feeling that no human brain could generate.
I loved Ilvëa with a soul-deep resonance that the Fëa-vesta had confirmed was elven to its core.
The Avari hadn't just followed me. They'd absorbed me. Remade me.
I was still faster than them. Still more driven. The human memories gave me an edge, a perspective, a toolkit that no native Quendi possessed. But the foundation underneath all of that was elven now.
The boy who'd woken up at Cuiviénen with too-old eyes was gone. He'd served his purpose and faded, the way a scaffold fades when the building is complete.
What remained was Selas. Son of Enel. Fourth-born of the Nelyar. Chief of the Avari.
And tomorrow — their Emperor.
I stood. Stretched.
I looked at the river. At Cuivorn's glow visible above the treeline. At the distant fires of my people, preparing for tomorrow.
I thought of Ilvëa. Of our future children. Of the nation we'd build together, generation by generation, century by century, until it could stand against anything the world threw at it.
That mattered. The rest was noise.
I went to sleep. The best sleep I'd had in years.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Next day. Eol's forge]
[Selas POV]
"Everything's ready."
Eol's voice pulled me out of the planning session I'd been drowning in. He stood in the doorway of the council building, arms crossed, that particular intensity in his dark eyes that meant he'd finished something and wanted it appreciated.
"Show me," I said.
His forge was hot, as always. The air tasted of charcoal and heated metal. Tools lined the walls in precise rows, organized by a system only Eol understood and no one dared rearrange.
Two objects sat on the central worktable, draped in soft leather.
Eol removed the first covering with the careful reverence of someone unveiling something sacred.
The Emperor's wreath.
{image: Wreath}
Silver. Forged to look like living branches, intertwined and flowing, with leaves that seemed to grow from the metal itself. Some of the leaves rose upward like the tines of a traditional crown, but organic, natural, as though a real tree had decided to become a symbol of authority.
Along the lower band where branch met branch, Eol had engraved water. A flowing, continuous river that wound through the silver roots, breaking into delicate waves where branches split apart, pooling into a still lake at the back of the wreath where the band rested against the wearer's nape.
The surface of the engraved lake held a reflection of stars, each one a pinprick of painstaking detail.
Cuiviénen. The Water of Awakening. Wrought into metal so I'd carry the memory of where we began everywhere the crown went.
Three of the leaf-tines were larger than the rest. And in each, set with a precision that bordered on obsessive, a gemstone.
Deep sapphire. White opal. Purple Amethyst.
Blue for the Lindar and the waters we loved.
White for the light of the stars under which we awakened.
Amethyst for the violet of my own eyes, the color that every Avari recognized as their Chief's before any title existed.
I couldn't speak for a moment. The craftsmanship was extraordinary. Every branch flowed into the next. Every leaf had individual veins. The water engravings moved with the eye, seeming to ripple when the wreath caught the light. The gems sat in their settings as though they'd grown there.
Eol removed the second covering.
The Empress's wreath.
{image: Wreath}
The same base of interwoven branches and silver leaves. But where the Emperor's wreath carried water and rising leaf-tines, the Empress's wreath bloomed.
Flowers and petals replaced the sharp upward points, crafted with such delicacy that I had to look twice to confirm they were metal and not real blossoms frozen in silver. Vines threaded between the flowers, and tiny dewdrops of opal dotted the petals like morning moisture caught in eternal stillness.
The same three gemstones. But the central stone was golden amber instead of sapphire. Warm as candlelight against the silver blossoms.
Then Eol placed a small wrapped bundle beside the wreaths and unfolded the cloth.
Two rings.
{ image: Rings }
Silver branches and tiny leaves wrapping around where a finger would sit. On each ring, two stones: amber and sapphire, shaped like teardrops, joined at their points. Gold and blue. Vanyar and Lindar. The union of two kindreds in a single circle.
"The gems," Eol said, and I could hear the pride, "represent who we are."
"Blue for our love of water," I said, still staring at the rings.
"Gold for the golden hair of your future wife." Eol nodded. "And white for what we all share. Every kindred. The stars that woke us."
I looked at the three colors together. Blue, white, gold. Water, starlight, warmth. Each one made the others brighter.
"You've created something magnificent," I told him.
Eol's chin lifted. The ghost of a smile crossed his face, there and gone, quick as a spark from an anvil.
"I know," he said.
Leaving the forge, I looked toward Cuivorn. Its crown rose above the construction works, luminous against the stars.
Avari's Tree. Our Tree. Soon to shelter our children.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[The day of the coronation. Avarstad]
[Beneath Cuivorn]
The platform stood at the base of Cuivorn.
The Tree had become the obvious choice for the ceremony's location. Its pale trunk rose behind the wooden stage like a pillar holding up the sky, branches spreading overhead in a living canopy of gold and silver leaves.
The faint luminescence that had once been subtle now cast visible patterns of light across the clearing, shifting and flowing as the branches swayed in a breeze.
Cuivorn knew what was happening. I could feel its awareness pressing gently against mine — curiosity and anticipation.
Three thousand Avari filled the clearing and spilled into the surrounding forest. Standing on roots, on stones, on each other's shoulders. Children hoisted up for a better view. Warriors in formation at the edges, more from habit than necessity.
The horns sounded.
Deep, resonant, carved from the great horns of elk that roamed the southern plains. The sound rolled across the clearing and echoed off the trees, silencing the crowd in a single breath.
The Elders walked onto the platform first. Thoron, Maethor, Írissë.
Then the Imperial Council. Vertalas, Mireth, Celestia, Eol, Opheon, Dirmal, Amalaë, Mithlen, Temeryl, Balga, Gelasiël, Yalinim. One by one, each taking their place.
I came last. Alone.
The crowd parted for me like water. I walked through a corridor of faces I'd known for centuries. Friends. Soldiers. Craftsmen.
Children who'd been born on the March and had never known a world without me in it.
I climbed the steps.
The Elders spoke first. One by one, they addressed the people, announcing the decisions of the councils. The governmental structure. The laws. The rights and obligations. The provincial system.
For many Avari who'd been working at distant sites, the full scope of these changes was new. Excited murmuring rippled through the crowd. Questions shouted from the back rows. Councilors answering from the platform.
Then Thoron stepped forward. The eldest Elder. The first to stand with me at the Sundering.
"The people have spoken," he said. His voice, thin with age in wisdom but not in body, carried across the clearing with surprising strength. "The Avari have chosen their Emperor."
He turned to me.
I stepped forward.
"Avari," I said. My voice carried the way it always did in moments like this, trained by decades of addressing crowds from platforms and hilltops. "Today we create our own Empire. But an Empire cannot stand without its Emperor."
I looked out at them. Met their eyes. As many as I could.
"I thank you. For the trust you've placed in me. For the road you walked beside me. For every sacrifice, every battle, every day of labor that brought us here."
Dirmal approached from the side, carrying a cushion. On it, gleaming in Cuivorn's light, lay the Emperor's wreath.
A moment of silence.
The silence of thousands people holding their breath at the same time.
I took the wreath in both hands.
Lifted it above my head.
Turned in a slow circle so every Avari in that clearing could see the silver branches, the gemstones, the leaves that caught the light and scattered it like promises.
And then I placed it on my own head.
No one crowned me. No Elder bestowed it. No priest or god or higher authority granted permission.
{image: The Crowning of Selas}
I took the crown myself, because the Avari Emperor's authority came from the people's trust and was wielded by his own hand.
The silver settled against my brow. Cool and surprisingly heavy. But the weight of it had nothing to do with metal.
Vertalas Baradriel stepped forward. His military voice, the one that carried across battlefields, rang out like a war horn.
"If lere Selas, Vaeratar of Avarstad and Avarderon! Emperor of the Avari!"
And the world exploded.
"IF LERE VAERATAR SELAS!!!"
The roar hit me like a physical force. Three thousand voices unified into a single sound that shook the leaves of Cuivorn and sent birds scattering from the surrounding trees.
{image: The Cry of the Avari}
"If lere Avari!"
"URA!" The warriors' battle cry, thundering from a hundred throats.
"Long live the Emperor!"
"Glory to the Avari!"
Cuivorn's branches swayed. Not from wind. From joy.
The Tree's ósanwë presence flared, and every Avari in the clearing felt it: a pulse of warmth, of welcome, of something ancient and alive acknowledging what had just been born.
I stood on the platform beneath the Tree of Awakening, wearing a wreath of silver branches with three gemstones blazing red and blue and gold, and looked out at my people.
My people.
For one moment, just one, I let myself feel it. Not the weight. Not the responsibility.
The pride.
Then I raised my hand. The crowd quieted, slowly, reluctantly, like a fire settling from roar to crackle.
"One more thing," I said.
The clearing held its breath again.
"Tomorrow, the Emperor takes a wife."
The silence lasted exactly one heartbeat. Then the cheering was even louder than before.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 14.2]
GLOSSARY
TERMS
Vaeratar — The Avarin word for Emperor. Used alongside the common title as the specifically Avari form of address for their sovereign.
If lere — Avari exclamation meaning "Hail" or "Long live." Used as a battle cry and as a proclamation of loyalty. Established during the March and the Battle of the Carnen River. Now adopted as the formal acclamation of the Emperor.