JuanaDArkVaro🇲🇽🌮

Sam wins the final battle by planting trees The Ring is in the fire. Sauron is gone. Saruman is dead on the doorstep of Bag End. And the Shire has no trees. They were cut down recklessly, everywhere, for no reason at all except that Saruman wanted to leave something behind that the winners couldn't fix. He told them so to their faces. He'd done things they would find "hard to mend or undo in your lives." And Sam agreed with him. He walks through the wreckage and works out the timeline himself. Maybe his great-grandchildren would see the Shire he grew up in. Three generations. Then he remembers the box. Go back two books, to a wood a thousand miles away. Galadriel is handing out gifts. Aragorn gets a stone out of legend. Frodo gets a light to carry into the dark. Legolas gets a bow. Sam gets dirt. She tells him flat out that it won't keep him on the road and won't defend him from anything. Then she says this. "Though you should find all barren and laid waste." Read that again. It's conditional. She never tells him it's going to happen. She just makes sure that if it does, he's the one holding the answer. Then she lets him carry it all the way through Mordor without once thinking about it. So he walks the Shire. All of it. A sapling wherever a beloved tree was killed, a grain of her dust at every root. When the dust runs low he goes to the Three-Farthing Stone, dead centre of the country, and throws what's left into the air with his blessing. The silver nut goes in the Party Field. Where the tree Bilbo held his party under used to stand. Then spring, and the trees come up as if time were in a hurry and wanted one year to do for twenty. Silver bark. Golden flowers. "The only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea." Saruman promised them a wound that would outlast their lives. The tree flowered on the sixth of April. And for generations after, the hobbits around Hobbiton Hill made holiday and danced in the Party Field on that date, and they never could agree why. Some said it was the day the Golden Tree first bloomed. Some said it was the Elves' New Year. Some said it was just old Sam Gardner's birthday