while kissing my cat's little head: you're a problem *smooch* you're a terror *smooch* you're a menace to society *smooch smooch smooch*
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Lu Ten: I'm sorry to say this, kiddos, but your father has passed away.
Zuko(10): *bursts into tears*
Azula(8): *shocked* How...how did father die?
Lu Ten: Uhh
(Flasback to Lu Ten shoving Ozai out the window)
Lu Ten: Assassin.
Lu Ten: With more arm strength than he thought he had.
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How much more deranged would Middle-Earth be if Tolkien was given access to modern scholarship re:the ageless depth of trees?
It’s true that by the end of the Third Age, no trees in Eregion remember the elves that walked there. But there’s an ancient yew in Rivendell that Gil-Galad planted, a clone of one of the old trees of Lindon, that’s still thriving when Elrond leaves his home. It’s seen elven kings and laughing lords and harried messengers. Though trees don’t care about such things, it’s nice to be seen.
There’s a golden aspen grove between Lothlorien and Fangorn. The elves say Nimrodel planted it before her name was Nimrodel, before continents sank, when the forests were home only to a handful who loved them more than paradise.
By the shores of the Mirrormere is another yew. In a little known tradition, kept by one dwarf alone, every Durin plants a few of its seeds, and one of those trees always lives long enough to see his next self.
There’s a cypress in the port of Umbar. Locals say the lord in Mordor planted it the first time he visited (he was still in the habit of planting trees back then). It lived past several of his deaths but faltered, finally, beneath the ashes of his last, worst destruction—more than four thousand years later.
On a tiny island in the sea is a little cluster of spruce trees—some scrap of drowned Beleriand too holy, for one reason or another, to falter. It’s the same tree—when one falters a new coppice comes to take its place, growing out of the same root system. There’s a betting pool among the deep sea fishers of the Falathrin about whose grave lies beneath.
Much is made of the White Tree of Gondor, but on the hillsides in Ithilien, dangerously close to Minas Ithil, are gnarled olive trees that witnessed the Last Alliance. Faramir is inordinately fond of them without knowing the reason why.
Ulmo keeps a garden of sea sponges. The oldest didn’t just see Númenor founded and drowned, it saw the bones of the very first second-comers. (Ossë collects many things.) It’s been… 10,000 years? 12,000? Sponges don’t keep time, they just remember.
Ulmo also keeps a bed of sea grass older than the destruction of the Lamps, but he doesn’t mention that to other people; it’s just for him.
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