Gold Berry

Chapter 1: Of the Birth of Gold Berry, Daughter of the Forest and of the Waters

It is told among the Eldar that in the first youth of Arda, when the world was yet tender and the mountains had not been worn low beneath the unrelenting tread of Time, all things born beneath the heavens were granted a nature unto themselves, even as the notes of the Music of the Ainur had been sung before ever the first dawn broke upon the circles of the world. Some spirits were made to love the light; some were ordained to endure the darkness; and others were born to bear the sword, to raise mighty cities, to swear solemn oaths—and in the end either to keep them, or perish with them unbroken upon their lips.

Yet rarer than all these were those spirits who belonged to no throne, who were not fashioned for war, nor drawn toward dominion or renown. Such spirits were summoned instead by the earth beneath, by the wandering wind, by the flowing waters, and by things older still than speech. They were the children of the world's own memory; and when they came into being, even Nature herself bent low to greet them.

Gold Berry was one such spirit.

Yet to understand her coming, one must not begin with the night she first cried beneath the stars. Nay—it is needful to journey farther back, to the waning years of the First Age of Middle-earth, when the world had but newly staggered out from beneath a grief too great for mortal tongues.

For in those days the West of the world lay sundered and broken. After the War of Wrath, when the power of Morgoth had at last been cast down and his fires quenched, Beleriand—that fair land which had once been the pride of the greatest kingdoms remembered by the Eldar—was swallowed beneath the sea, like some beautiful dream borne away by a merciless tide. Those who survived and departed westward carried within them not only sorrow, but also the terrible silence of those who had looked upon too much ruin to speak of it thereafter.

Yet eastward of the Misty Mountains there remained a land upon which the hand of war had not directly fallen.

This was Greenwood the Great, that vast and ancient forest which men of later and darker years would call by another name: Mirkwood.

But in those elder days it knew not shadow.

It was a sea of green and living light; an ocean without water, wherein every branch was as a sail set against the wind of heaven. Its oaks had stood since the Moon herself was too young to have waxed and waned often enough for any mind to think to count her turnings. Its streams ran clear as crystal, and the stones beneath their beds had been made smooth by a thousand thousand years of singing.

The Silvan Elves loved that forest not as one loves a place of dwelling, but as one loves a mother. They built no towering citadels of stone, nor white towers looking wistfully toward the West, as did the Noldor. Rather they dwelt among the trees, slept beneath the shelter of leaves, and learned from childhood that every falling leaf bore meaning.

Among them there lived a wedded pair beside a narrow branch of a woodland stream, where golden berries grew thick upon the banks whenever late summer came.

The father was called Calenor, a simple archer who bore no title save the honour of steadfast devotion. He was not counted among the great voices in the councils of elders, nor sung of by poets in the loftiest lays; yet his hand never trembled upon the bowstring, and his eyes were keen enough to mark a stag moving through heavy mist a hundred paces hence.

The mother was named Nessael, a healer and a keeper of waters, to whom young mothers came when their children burned with fever, and to whom hunters and warriors returned when the wounds upon their flesh had closed, but the deeper wounds within had not.

These two lived apart from the greater dwellings of their kin—not in exile, but by choice; for they had chosen quiet. And the forest, which has ever shown favour to those who honour it, granted them a small patch of earth where the morning sun lingered longer than elsewhere.